Introduction
We have been asking ourselves a single question: What does it mean to be a Christian? This is the all-important question for everyone who styles themselves "a believer" in the Gospel, but as we have seen, the rise of specialization within academic disciplines has led to a presentation of the Gospel reduced to just a basic kerygmatic set of propositions that one believes. "Faith" becomes separate from "morality" and views the moral content of the Gospel as secondary to the kerygmatic content. This academic specialization trickles down, as it were, to the whole body of believers, causing an essential separation of "what I do" from "what I believe."
The result? Pastors are tempted to shy away from controversial moral issues in order to keep the people in the pews. This also creates the situation where people are living and supporting immoral behaviors yet still considering themselves committed Christians. This series of blog posts seeks to address this problem and suggest an answer or two.
Return to the Sources
Back in the day it was fashionable for wise men to found schools of thought in order to keep their teachings in perpetuity, but Jesus did not do this. Jesus Christ started the Church. To understand the Church is to understand the answer to what it means to be a Christian, what it means to join faith to morals in an all-embracing form that distorts neither. We need to return to the sources of the Church in order to answer this question.
In the previous article I spoke about the Apostolic Church's self-understanding. They were not members of a club, an organization, or a political party. They were communally a part of The Way of the Lord Jesus. They were Christians, followers of Christ Jesus, who understood their call to be precisely that: little christs in the world. The word for church, ekklesia, is a Greek word that translates the Hebrew qahal- the assembly, or literally 'the called-out ones'. They saw in Christ a New Moses who was calling out a people from the bondage of slavery to sin to journey to the promised land of eternal life. Christ is the new and final mediator between God and Man, and so the People of God would not be defined by ancestral bloodlines, but by His blood shed "for you and for all".
The Church, then, did not gather its essential identity from the world as a geo-political, ethnic, or social organization of men, but rather the Church was born through the encounter of man with God in Jesus Christ. The Church was fashioned from His Body and remains forever His Bride. The New Israel of God, the Church, is not a man-made institution, but a Christ-fashioned organism. She is living, vital, not on her own, but only through the life that Jesus breathes upon it through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is in the Church, first and foremost, that we know who we are, our identity, and from this flows “what I believe” and “what I do.” They are bound to one another.
New Creation is New Life
Jesus Christ does not want believers! He is sick and tired of believers! (see Matthew 7:21-23) Jesus wants followers. Those who seek to hide the Church’s moral teaching behind a more vaguely stated and less controversial kerygma loose sight of very thing that conjoins faith with morality: becoming a Christian means precisely a new way of life as a new creation. Christianity is the answer to the question How should I live?
Both the truths of faith as well as the truths of morality interpenetrate one another in order to form the good news of Christianity, for they are both located, grounded, rooted in a living person, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the object of our Faith, for He is the final Word spoken from the Father by the breath of the Holy Spirit to humanity. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” who entered into the human condition to communicate the life of God to man. He is the fullness of God’s self-revelation to mankind, and in becoming “like us in all things except sin,” Jesus simultaneously reveals man to himself, as Vatican II insightfully taught.
Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus, in themselves, but rather we follow Jesus. Everything that Jesus thought, spoke, or did, all of His actions are caught up in the self-revelation of God to man. The decision to follow Christ is not a decision to believe a list of facts, but is to convert oneself to a truth to be lived, moving to a whole new state-of-being. The path of the Way of the Lord Jesus is a “recognizable form of life,” according to Livio Melina, “It is Christ who reveals in truth the heart of man, who reveals to man his highest vocation.”
That is why Jesus does not want mere believers or “hearers of the word”, because one cannot really know Jesus Christ without following Him along the way, without being “doers of the word.” It is all or nothing in the Christian life- Incarnation, life, suffering, death, resurrection- everything in the life of the Man discloses the heart of the Trinity, demonstrates that in God’s innermost mystery “is love.”
The gospel of Jesus is total, integral to the person who would have faith in God. To be a Christian is to be a new creation, the adopted son or daughter of God the Father in the Son Jesus by the Spirit of Jesus through grace.
The Incarnation
Concluding these brief and non-exhaustive thoughts on living the Christian life, one must turn again to our Savior to see the union of faith and morals in the life, in the very being of Jesus, that is relevant to answering our question.
Some Christians hold that morality is separated from faith because it has to do with human duties and works, that to believe morality truly bears upon eternal life is to substitute a false gospel of works-based righteous for the real gospel of faith alone. To such Christians, with great love and affection, I have a few concluding words to say that might help frame the discussion.
Primacy is given to faith over works because it is from our knowledge of who Jesus is and what He did that we base our lives (works) upon. I grant that outright. However, before both faith and works is grace, God’s free gift, that is poured into our very being by His righteousness.
Faith, in the sense of man’s response to God, is thus clearly a work of man, an action that man freely performs in conformity to the life of grace given to him by God. A man responding generously to God is doing an act that can be verily be described as moral. Any morally good actions done by man that is pleasing to God is done only through the power of His divine grace.
In order to re-examine the faith/works dichotomy, we must look to Christ in just what He reveals about man’s highest vocation. Jesus’ life is our life. Jesus was fully God and fully man. The Incarnation reveals not only the humility of God, but also reprinstinates human dignity. When Jesus healed, He healed as one who is fully God and fully man. When He spoke, He spoke as divine and human, perfectly united without any separation of the two natures. When He died, God died.
The Incarnation of Jesus demonstrates our highest vocation, which is to be so fully united to God by His Holy Spirit that we act like Christ: fully God’s divine grace and fully our work. The moment we begin in the authentic Christian life to separate “my work” from “God’s grace” is the moment we moved away from being followers and entered into the realm of mere believers. Yes, we are fallen creatures, prone to sin and lovers of temptation, but that is precisely where the work of the merits of Christ’s redemption is so radical: He makes it possible to live the Christian life by giving us the Spirit of the One who perfectly lived the Christian life.
Thus, to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ by hiding the controversial moral teachings is to not preach the full gospel. It is to preach, ultimately, a false gospel. Depriving people of the Church morality deprives them of the saving freedom that Christ died to give us, which is a real freedom from slavery to sinfulness. Christianity is the simple call to follow Jesus Christ in a new way of life.
AMDG
Showing posts with label Jesus Christ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus Christ. Show all posts
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Ortho-doxy/praxis. think about it.
Introduction
What does it mean to live the Christian life, to be a follower of Jesus Christ? That question is what we are seeking an answer to, but there is the principle obstacle that we must overcome (besides the trifecta: world, flesh and the devil), which is the tendency of our culture towards super specialization. This specialization, this division of a whole down to its parts, has created in the realm of praxis a dividing wall between faith and morals.
Kerygma
One of the greatest of modern problems with pastoral work, especially evangelization, is the desire to preach and teach the whole saving message of the Good News without denying anything essential. It is indeed Good News when God not only teaches us about how to live, but that the Divine Author wrote Himself into the story, became an actor, and communicated the fullness of life. If Love itself were to take on flesh, bone and blood, what would this human life look like from this perspective?
How incredible a proposition! How unbelievable a statement! "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
This is the Gospel: that God so loved us that He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave- teaching, living, loving, crying, and dying so that we might be freed from slavery to death. And in His glorious resurrection there is the promise of eternal life for us by sharing in His life through the Holy Spirit! This is the gospel, the Good News of Christianity, the "true Philosophy", the perennial wisdom.
And yet, this is not all. It is to the person of Jesus Christ that we turn to in our object of Christian faith. We seek Him, to know Him and love Him, in order to understand what it means to be a follow of Christ. But we know from the earliest of times, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, that being a Christian was more than a series of propositions to be believed, but a life to be lived. In contrast to the Buddha who said, "Look not to me; look rather to my dharma [doctrine]" and Mohammed who claimed only one miracle, the writing of the Koran, in Jesus we find statement after statement that He (or the Trinity) is the content of the Faith. In the center of orthodox and traditional Christianity we find not a series of doctrines or sacred writings, but the Word Himself, the person of Jesus Christ who reveals to man the inner life of the Blessed Trinity and who, in the words of Vatican II, "reveals man to himself." And it is in Jesus that our lives, not just our beliefs, need to be true and good.
What does all this have to do with our question, well and good as it may seem? The reality is that in modern Christianity, especially Catholicism, when it comes to understanding the faith, we look to either Sacred Scripture and its academic field of exegesis or we look to the Systematic Theology and its doctrinal statements and dogmatic formulations. To learn how to live we do not turn to either of the above, but instead to Moral Theology, especially focused on the Natural Law and Casuistry, or to Spiritual Theology as lived in the various orders throughout church history. We get lost in the divisions, the separations, the subcategorization of the specialization.
I said above "especially in Catholicism" because, since the rise of the Medieval Scholasticism, we have been extremely scientific in our approach to the various theological disciplines. Protestants can avoid some of these tendencies due to their exclusive attention to Sacred Scripture and the emphasis in evangelical Christianity on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. These can offer as a balance, but that is realized only on a popular level. Once one enters the realm of academia, largely, this balance is lost because of the modernist approach to specialization in all American places of higher education.
Praxis
All of the early followers of Jesus Christ, from the Gospels to the Early Church, encounter the Christian message as metanoia, as a call to repentance, conversion, and a life of holiness. This life of holiness was understood and the heart and soul of Christianity, which is why the earliest followers of Christ were not called "christians" but rather "followers of The Way". The Way or The Way of the Lord Jesus, was a sect within Judaism, to be sure, but its name reveals more than that. It reveals the interpenetration of faith and morals, of life and belief, in a way that cannot be so easily separated. Jesus Christ did not come to give us a series of beliefs, but to make us a new creation, one with His eternal life. New life certainly, and do not get me wrong here, involves right teaching (ortho-doxy) but it is not limited to it. The content of our faith, then, is transformational and not mere information. The encounter with Jesus leaves the individual asking, "How do I now live" and "Lord, teach us to pray."
To utilize the language, the Church is the guardian of the Deposit of Faith handed down to us from Jesus and His Apostles to the Catholic Church. Faith and morals forms the singular Deposit of Faith, the one saving message of the Good News of Jesus. They are not two messages. In fact, the earliest non-biblical writing of the Church, the Didache, uses the traditional pedagogical method of "The Two Ways" in order to layout the life of the Christian. It is here in the interpenetration of the two- faith and morals- that we see the importance of ortho-praxis (right acting) is just as important as ortho-doxy (right belief).
Union of the Two
And so we realize now, hopefully, that the content of the Good News is a message that involves things like the Trinity and the Resurrection, but also about moral questions, situations, laws and virtues. The question "What must I believe?" cannot be separated from the question, "What must I do?" It is in the union of belief and practice, in faith and morals, that the fullest possible understanding of "living the Christian life" can possibly offer.
If we persist in maintaining a separation of faith and morals, of saying that being a Christian means only believing these sets of truths about God and Jesus and keep questions about moral thoughts, words, and deeds bracketed, one will always have a half-faith, also known as a false religion. The implications of the Gospel challenge our social, political, and moral perspectives. They have to because they are God's and not man's.
peace,
gomer.
AMDG
What does it mean to live the Christian life, to be a follower of Jesus Christ? That question is what we are seeking an answer to, but there is the principle obstacle that we must overcome (besides the trifecta: world, flesh and the devil), which is the tendency of our culture towards super specialization. This specialization, this division of a whole down to its parts, has created in the realm of praxis a dividing wall between faith and morals.
Kerygma
One of the greatest of modern problems with pastoral work, especially evangelization, is the desire to preach and teach the whole saving message of the Good News without denying anything essential. It is indeed Good News when God not only teaches us about how to live, but that the Divine Author wrote Himself into the story, became an actor, and communicated the fullness of life. If Love itself were to take on flesh, bone and blood, what would this human life look like from this perspective?
How incredible a proposition! How unbelievable a statement! "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
This is the Gospel: that God so loved us that He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave- teaching, living, loving, crying, and dying so that we might be freed from slavery to death. And in His glorious resurrection there is the promise of eternal life for us by sharing in His life through the Holy Spirit! This is the gospel, the Good News of Christianity, the "true Philosophy", the perennial wisdom.
And yet, this is not all. It is to the person of Jesus Christ that we turn to in our object of Christian faith. We seek Him, to know Him and love Him, in order to understand what it means to be a follow of Christ. But we know from the earliest of times, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, that being a Christian was more than a series of propositions to be believed, but a life to be lived. In contrast to the Buddha who said, "Look not to me; look rather to my dharma [doctrine]" and Mohammed who claimed only one miracle, the writing of the Koran, in Jesus we find statement after statement that He (or the Trinity) is the content of the Faith. In the center of orthodox and traditional Christianity we find not a series of doctrines or sacred writings, but the Word Himself, the person of Jesus Christ who reveals to man the inner life of the Blessed Trinity and who, in the words of Vatican II, "reveals man to himself." And it is in Jesus that our lives, not just our beliefs, need to be true and good.
What does all this have to do with our question, well and good as it may seem? The reality is that in modern Christianity, especially Catholicism, when it comes to understanding the faith, we look to either Sacred Scripture and its academic field of exegesis or we look to the Systematic Theology and its doctrinal statements and dogmatic formulations. To learn how to live we do not turn to either of the above, but instead to Moral Theology, especially focused on the Natural Law and Casuistry, or to Spiritual Theology as lived in the various orders throughout church history. We get lost in the divisions, the separations, the subcategorization of the specialization.
I said above "especially in Catholicism" because, since the rise of the Medieval Scholasticism, we have been extremely scientific in our approach to the various theological disciplines. Protestants can avoid some of these tendencies due to their exclusive attention to Sacred Scripture and the emphasis in evangelical Christianity on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. These can offer as a balance, but that is realized only on a popular level. Once one enters the realm of academia, largely, this balance is lost because of the modernist approach to specialization in all American places of higher education.
Praxis
All of the early followers of Jesus Christ, from the Gospels to the Early Church, encounter the Christian message as metanoia, as a call to repentance, conversion, and a life of holiness. This life of holiness was understood and the heart and soul of Christianity, which is why the earliest followers of Christ were not called "christians" but rather "followers of The Way". The Way or The Way of the Lord Jesus, was a sect within Judaism, to be sure, but its name reveals more than that. It reveals the interpenetration of faith and morals, of life and belief, in a way that cannot be so easily separated. Jesus Christ did not come to give us a series of beliefs, but to make us a new creation, one with His eternal life. New life certainly, and do not get me wrong here, involves right teaching (ortho-doxy) but it is not limited to it. The content of our faith, then, is transformational and not mere information. The encounter with Jesus leaves the individual asking, "How do I now live" and "Lord, teach us to pray."
To utilize the language, the Church is the guardian of the Deposit of Faith handed down to us from Jesus and His Apostles to the Catholic Church. Faith and morals forms the singular Deposit of Faith, the one saving message of the Good News of Jesus. They are not two messages. In fact, the earliest non-biblical writing of the Church, the Didache, uses the traditional pedagogical method of "The Two Ways" in order to layout the life of the Christian. It is here in the interpenetration of the two- faith and morals- that we see the importance of ortho-praxis (right acting) is just as important as ortho-doxy (right belief).
Union of the Two
And so we realize now, hopefully, that the content of the Good News is a message that involves things like the Trinity and the Resurrection, but also about moral questions, situations, laws and virtues. The question "What must I believe?" cannot be separated from the question, "What must I do?" It is in the union of belief and practice, in faith and morals, that the fullest possible understanding of "living the Christian life" can possibly offer.
If we persist in maintaining a separation of faith and morals, of saying that being a Christian means only believing these sets of truths about God and Jesus and keep questions about moral thoughts, words, and deeds bracketed, one will always have a half-faith, also known as a false religion. The implications of the Gospel challenge our social, political, and moral perspectives. They have to because they are God's and not man's.
peace,
gomer.
AMDG
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Trained Up in Love, Part II
Always Faithful
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.
Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.
Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!
That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."
So what does it mean to be faithful in love?
First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"
How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.
And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.
Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.
Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"
The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.
Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.
And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.
In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.
Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.
There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.
The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!
Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.
For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!
God love you,
Mike
AMDG
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.
Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.
Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!
That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."
So what does it mean to be faithful in love?
First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"
How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.
And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.
Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.
Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"
The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.
Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.
And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.
In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.
Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.
There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.
The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!
Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.
For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!
God love you,
Mike
AMDG
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Trained Up in True Love, part 1
The Freedom of the Gift
For love to be true, it must first be free. For no one can force love or make one love another against one's own will. Love must always be free. But, freedom exists for the sake of love and not the other way around. Love does not exist for the sake of freedom. It is always a tragedy when a person breaks his relationship because, he feels, it limits his freedom. "I'm too young to settle down. I have so much I want to do."
Love does limit your freedom in very real ways. Saying "I do!" to one woman implies alongside it a million little "I don'ts" to every other woman in the world. As a man marrying one woman, if he knows what is best for him, he has effectively unmarried every other woman in the world, he has cut them off forever as being an option for his heart. Nope buddy, that is it.
However, in another sense it is precisely this love that busts open the very nature of freedom and takes it to a whole new level. The dynamism of Christian love, which is always utterly human and also completely divine, widens the individual human heart when it is given away to one's beloved in such a total fashion. Freedom serves love, but love broadens freedom. By loving this one woman "until death do you part," you have opened up a new world of giving and receiving that was not possible a few months before.
Another problem that often afflicts human relationships is that people are not really free. Sure, they might not be slaves forced into a marriage, but they may be moral slaves to some dark sin, habit or behavior that prevents them from truly giving themselves over to their beloved. Moral freedom is more important then physical freedom. It is why the Scriptures tell us over and again that it is better to be wise and poor than a fool who is king. The king is a slave to his foolishness. But moral slavery to sin is even worse than ignorance because it corrupts what it encounters, like Midas' touch in reverse. In order to freely give yourself, you must fully possess yourself. In order to possess yourself, you must have self-control. It is this idea of self-control and moral discipline that has fallen completely out of fashion in today's culture. But if you want to give yourself away in love, you cannot give what you do not have. Fasting, abstinence, disciplining your will, your flesh, your passions, all of this serves the cause of true, internal, moral freedom. And love, for it to be real love, must be always free.
The Two Disguises: Lust & Infatuation
The problem with our fallen human nature, especially in us young people, is that love is often manifested in two really big ways. One way is the counterfeit, lust. The other way is the halfway house: infatuation. These can become two painful distractions that cause more pain and heartache than anything else in a relationship because these two problems tend to disguise themselves as love. Lust and infatuation have always been with us, damaging relationships and breaking hearts, but today we have experienced the widespread cultural acceptance of lust and infatuation. In fact, especially in youth culture, these are the only two forms that seem to matter any more, which is horrid because they are passing, illusory, and emptying.
Lust and Infatuation due the same thing but from two different angles. They each commit the grave sin of reduction. Lust reduces the beloved to their sexual value. Infatuation reduces the person to their sentimental/emotional value. To reduce someone from their intrinsic value and high dignity (dare we say "sanctity") of being a person to just this or that specific characteristic is to loose sight of loves wholeness. In a sense, love is wholeness. As the good Pope John Paul II once quipped, "Pornography is wrong not because it shows too much, but because it shows too little. It reduces the person to just his/her sexual value."
Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that there are three sins that humanity struggles with in three different phases of life. The young (teens and adults) struggle with lust. The middle-aged struggle with greed. And it is the old who struggle with the desire for power. The more ministry I do with parents, young adults, and teens, the more I realize this to be true.
Lust is so easy to fall into for young adults and teens because it taps into their energy, their zeal, their refusal to compromise or to water down life. But it also taps into the fact that, when it comes to life, love and relationships, the young are still just rookies. The lack of moral experiences, of years of developing endurance, long suffering, and dedication to principles just is not there and cannot be there due to a lack of the quantity of years. So this is where moral training needs to take place, especially in the areas of discipline, commitment, and abstinence.
But for teens in a unique way that I don't think the young adults deal with as much is the tendency to reduce love to its sentimental or emotional value. I cannot begin to list the tales of high school and junior high girls that have come up to me extolling the virtues of their "true love" and their "fairly tale" romance, only to have it end a week or two later. Many teens cycle quickly through boyfriends and girlfriends because they are hungering for emotional attachments and satisfaction. Their relationships are like the grain of seed that falls upon the shallow soil. It sprouts quickly, but fails dramatically, because its roots are not deep enough to sustain growth and weather bad times. It is the emotional high of being in love that keeps them coming back for more.
I once knew a girl whose boyfriend committed suicide after she broke up with him. She mourned, as did we all, for this horrific loss. After two or so weeks go by, she had another boyfriend! While this relationships was a massive attempt to rebound and to heal, this was her typical behavior. At the conclusion of each relationship, a new one was started two weeks later.
I described infatuation as "a halfway house" to love because true love can start there. Love most certainly involves the emotions! Love is not a rational head game between two persons who reasoned their lives into one synthesis, but is a total giving and receiving. As long as these young lovers persist in loving through the emotional onto the higher planes, then infatuation is just fine. But if it stops there, if it remains this weak, sentimental thing, then it is ultimately destructive, fading away like plants with shallow roots. Emotions are too fickle to be the basis of the bond between two persons.
So in conclusion, for love to be true it must be both free and total. Love cannot settle for a halfway house to compromise with counterfeits. It cannot be taken, but freely given by persons truly at liberty with themselves. "For freedom Christ set you free!"
For love to be true, it must first be free. For no one can force love or make one love another against one's own will. Love must always be free. But, freedom exists for the sake of love and not the other way around. Love does not exist for the sake of freedom. It is always a tragedy when a person breaks his relationship because, he feels, it limits his freedom. "I'm too young to settle down. I have so much I want to do."
Love does limit your freedom in very real ways. Saying "I do!" to one woman implies alongside it a million little "I don'ts" to every other woman in the world. As a man marrying one woman, if he knows what is best for him, he has effectively unmarried every other woman in the world, he has cut them off forever as being an option for his heart. Nope buddy, that is it.
However, in another sense it is precisely this love that busts open the very nature of freedom and takes it to a whole new level. The dynamism of Christian love, which is always utterly human and also completely divine, widens the individual human heart when it is given away to one's beloved in such a total fashion. Freedom serves love, but love broadens freedom. By loving this one woman "until death do you part," you have opened up a new world of giving and receiving that was not possible a few months before.
Another problem that often afflicts human relationships is that people are not really free. Sure, they might not be slaves forced into a marriage, but they may be moral slaves to some dark sin, habit or behavior that prevents them from truly giving themselves over to their beloved. Moral freedom is more important then physical freedom. It is why the Scriptures tell us over and again that it is better to be wise and poor than a fool who is king. The king is a slave to his foolishness. But moral slavery to sin is even worse than ignorance because it corrupts what it encounters, like Midas' touch in reverse. In order to freely give yourself, you must fully possess yourself. In order to possess yourself, you must have self-control. It is this idea of self-control and moral discipline that has fallen completely out of fashion in today's culture. But if you want to give yourself away in love, you cannot give what you do not have. Fasting, abstinence, disciplining your will, your flesh, your passions, all of this serves the cause of true, internal, moral freedom. And love, for it to be real love, must be always free.
The Two Disguises: Lust & Infatuation
The problem with our fallen human nature, especially in us young people, is that love is often manifested in two really big ways. One way is the counterfeit, lust. The other way is the halfway house: infatuation. These can become two painful distractions that cause more pain and heartache than anything else in a relationship because these two problems tend to disguise themselves as love. Lust and infatuation have always been with us, damaging relationships and breaking hearts, but today we have experienced the widespread cultural acceptance of lust and infatuation. In fact, especially in youth culture, these are the only two forms that seem to matter any more, which is horrid because they are passing, illusory, and emptying.
Lust and Infatuation due the same thing but from two different angles. They each commit the grave sin of reduction. Lust reduces the beloved to their sexual value. Infatuation reduces the person to their sentimental/emotional value. To reduce someone from their intrinsic value and high dignity (dare we say "sanctity") of being a person to just this or that specific characteristic is to loose sight of loves wholeness. In a sense, love is wholeness. As the good Pope John Paul II once quipped, "Pornography is wrong not because it shows too much, but because it shows too little. It reduces the person to just his/her sexual value."
Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that there are three sins that humanity struggles with in three different phases of life. The young (teens and adults) struggle with lust. The middle-aged struggle with greed. And it is the old who struggle with the desire for power. The more ministry I do with parents, young adults, and teens, the more I realize this to be true.
Lust is so easy to fall into for young adults and teens because it taps into their energy, their zeal, their refusal to compromise or to water down life. But it also taps into the fact that, when it comes to life, love and relationships, the young are still just rookies. The lack of moral experiences, of years of developing endurance, long suffering, and dedication to principles just is not there and cannot be there due to a lack of the quantity of years. So this is where moral training needs to take place, especially in the areas of discipline, commitment, and abstinence.
But for teens in a unique way that I don't think the young adults deal with as much is the tendency to reduce love to its sentimental or emotional value. I cannot begin to list the tales of high school and junior high girls that have come up to me extolling the virtues of their "true love" and their "fairly tale" romance, only to have it end a week or two later. Many teens cycle quickly through boyfriends and girlfriends because they are hungering for emotional attachments and satisfaction. Their relationships are like the grain of seed that falls upon the shallow soil. It sprouts quickly, but fails dramatically, because its roots are not deep enough to sustain growth and weather bad times. It is the emotional high of being in love that keeps them coming back for more.
I once knew a girl whose boyfriend committed suicide after she broke up with him. She mourned, as did we all, for this horrific loss. After two or so weeks go by, she had another boyfriend! While this relationships was a massive attempt to rebound and to heal, this was her typical behavior. At the conclusion of each relationship, a new one was started two weeks later.
I described infatuation as "a halfway house" to love because true love can start there. Love most certainly involves the emotions! Love is not a rational head game between two persons who reasoned their lives into one synthesis, but is a total giving and receiving. As long as these young lovers persist in loving through the emotional onto the higher planes, then infatuation is just fine. But if it stops there, if it remains this weak, sentimental thing, then it is ultimately destructive, fading away like plants with shallow roots. Emotions are too fickle to be the basis of the bond between two persons.
So in conclusion, for love to be true it must be both free and total. Love cannot settle for a halfway house to compromise with counterfeits. It cannot be taken, but freely given by persons truly at liberty with themselves. "For freedom Christ set you free!"
The Pain of Pornography
The Problem of Porn, as seen in Junior High
Two years ago I decided to take an informal poll among our jr. high boys during an EDGE Night on chastity. I asked four questions: Who has ever seen porn, who has seen porn in the last two months, who has seen it in the last two weeks, who has seen it in the last two days? Pretty much everyone raised their hands on the first one. The second question had about 90% of the room with their hands up. By the time I got to the last question, at least 80% of those junior high boys still kept their hands up!
There are 420 million pornographic pages on the internet with 12% of all websites on the Internet being pornographic sites. 42.7% of all internet users view porn online, bringing in a total of $4.9 billion dollars in porn sales in 2006. The American porn industry gets more revenue than NBA, NFL, and all baseball franchises put together. It generates twice as much revenue as NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Worldwide, porn generates an astounding $97.06 billion! In the United States a new porn video is being created every 39 minutes.
To say that our world today has a pornography problem is an understatement. But it is more. It is a tragedy. And it is a problem for every junior high boy in school today in our community because it is rapidly becoming a daily part of the youth culture, whether or not an individual is actually looking at it him/her self.
What does this mean? It means that at lunch time porn is a typical topic of conversation. It means that when teens are sleeping over someone else’s house, they often look at porn. What this means for us is that parents need to take another look at their child’s online life, to get involved, to have uncomfortable conversations and to protect your children from the distortion and exploitation of the Adult Industry today. And its time to bring Christ into the picture.
Understanding the Wrong of Pornography
Pornography is a powerful medium of distortion and fantasy that devalues women, distorts sex and sexuality, and reduces the dignity of the person to become just a collection of body parts.
Pornography robs men of the capacity to give of themselves in a self-sacrificial way. Men are outward oriented and when it comes to sexual arousal, men are visually stimulated. Porn is thus far more appealing to men than it is to women and in that it is far more destructive. Engaging in pornographic behaviors is attractive to men because it makes them feel like a man without asking anything of them in return. It essentially cripples a man’s heart because it does not challenge them, asks nothing in return. It is all just taking, taking, taking.
If love is about self-gift, then pornography trains a man in lust where instead of giving one’s self to one’s beloved, one takes. Lust is found in many places today, but for teens who are going through puberty and trying to discover who they are in life, it represents a powerful twisting of the good and natural sexual desires into perversion. The great mystery and dignity of the human person is lost to the viewer of porn, and instead the person is reduced to simply their body parts. The great value of the whole person is nothing more than the other’s ability to gratify my needs. You do not have worth because of who you are, but only in what you can do for me.
I think every parent agrees that today it is hard to be a woman. Women are constantly thrown images of what beauty should look like from billboards, movies, and magazines, that they are consistently feeling like they cannot measure up. Depression and anxiety about their bodies is common place in elementary age girls now. In a culture that looks approvingly upon pornography, as youth culture undeniably does, there is now an added pressure on women to not just be “hot” or “sexy”, but to be sexually available. Sadly, we are seeing this effect the even the junior high party scene where sex acts, especially oral sex and group viewing of porn, is increasing in our community.
Pornography turns sexual intimacy into a commodity for profit. It turns women into objects. It turns men’s hearts to selfishness and lust. It breeds further sexual perversions, earlier ages of incidents of sexual contact in teens, and it looses sight of the meaning and dignity of sexual love between spouses. As Pope John Paul II so famously put it: "The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the person to only his or her sexual value."
Habits in the Dark: A Sad Look into the Addictive Nature of Pornography
This article seeks to draw attention to the reality of a silent epidemic that is alive and well in America: Teenage pornography addiction.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. To many that struggle daily with an addiction to pornography, those images, videos, and sounds are worth a thousand agonies as well. Many parents today are surprised at the addictive nature of pornography and are often tempted to treat the problem as simply a matter of will power.
When a teenager first encounters pornography and becomes sexually aroused, his body reacts to the stimulus in a very specific way. The image causes the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine, which enters the bloodstream. When this reaches the brain, it causes that image to be locked into the memory of the teenager. Often the adults who have struggled with an addiction to pornography over the course of years or even decades can still recall the first images that they saw as a child or teenager. The imprint of the image on the brain of the adolescent is significant. The mere remembrance of that image can cause arousal in the individual.
The rush of epinephrine and the surge of other pleasure inducing chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, cause the porn user to experience a sexual high. The user seeks to return to this high, but finds that more images and a longer exposure to them is needed in order to experience that rush again. This leads to the formation of the habitual abuse of pornography and is often accompanied by masturbation.
As the habit becomes more ingrained and the seeking of this rush more difficult to achieve, the teen has probably viewed hundreds, if not thousands, of images and seen dozens of videos. At this stage it becomes compulsive.
The teen may also be experiencing intense feelings of shame and isolation, especially if the family and religious upbringing views porn negatively. These feelings tend to only drive the teen into further use, as the biochemical rush is also a means of temporary relief from stress or anxiety. The feeling of powerlessness over one’s life is increased, even more so when repeated attempts to stop viewing porn or to overcome past memories fails. The turning to pornography becomes a cycle as the teenager feels worthless after viewing it, but the worthless is what causes the teen to return to it again and again.
The most important message that a teen can hear at this point is one of healing and support. The addiction can be broken, but only by stronger means, such as counseling and yes, even medicine. The goal is moral freedom from lust, or in the language of Sexaholics Anonymous, "sexual sobriety." The longer the addictions are allowed to endure, the deeper the addiction takes hold of the person's psyche. It needs to be brought out into the light in order to find the revolutionary freedom that only purity, chastity and holiness can bring.
Better Parents. Active Parents.
Addictions, 100 billion dollar industries, and youth culture sustaining hedonism can seem like an impossible foe, but with our God “nothing is impossible.”
Parents, the worst thing you can do is not take action. First, have a conservation with your child about their online habits. Talk to them about sex, pornography, lust, love and real relationships. If you don’t, realize that the media already is speaking loudly, and chances are your values are being lost. Secondly, take practical steps to destroy the influence of porn. Remove all computers from bedrooms and have them in open, high traffic areas. Turn all screens towards the room and not the walls. Cancel certain cable channels, too. On your family computer, put software that monitors and/or filters internet content. Check your History folder often. If it has been recently cleared, that is usually a sign of someone hiding inappropriate online viewing.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the software available from www.xxxchurch.com called X3 Watch. This is an accountability program, not a filter, so it sends out a bi-weekly or monthly email to specific accountability partners (such as parents) containing flagged websites. Best of all, the scaled down version, which may be all you need, is free to download!
Finally, pray as a family. God is bigger than addiction, than lust, than sin. Through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ we have the strength to fight lust in our lives and bring all these things done in the dark into His merciful light. For it is only in the Light that we see the light, that we can see the wrongness of our actions and the experience the boundlessness of His merciful grace. Prayer every day, especially to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, and to Saint Michael the Archangel, will lead to victory. But no one can overcome alone. Get a group together who can support you and your teen. They need someone that can hold them accountable, that can pray for them and lift them up with strong words.
Praise Him in the dust of our humanity,
Mike Gormley
AMDG
Two years ago I decided to take an informal poll among our jr. high boys during an EDGE Night on chastity. I asked four questions: Who has ever seen porn, who has seen porn in the last two months, who has seen it in the last two weeks, who has seen it in the last two days? Pretty much everyone raised their hands on the first one. The second question had about 90% of the room with their hands up. By the time I got to the last question, at least 80% of those junior high boys still kept their hands up!
There are 420 million pornographic pages on the internet with 12% of all websites on the Internet being pornographic sites. 42.7% of all internet users view porn online, bringing in a total of $4.9 billion dollars in porn sales in 2006. The American porn industry gets more revenue than NBA, NFL, and all baseball franchises put together. It generates twice as much revenue as NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. Worldwide, porn generates an astounding $97.06 billion! In the United States a new porn video is being created every 39 minutes.
To say that our world today has a pornography problem is an understatement. But it is more. It is a tragedy. And it is a problem for every junior high boy in school today in our community because it is rapidly becoming a daily part of the youth culture, whether or not an individual is actually looking at it him/her self.
What does this mean? It means that at lunch time porn is a typical topic of conversation. It means that when teens are sleeping over someone else’s house, they often look at porn. What this means for us is that parents need to take another look at their child’s online life, to get involved, to have uncomfortable conversations and to protect your children from the distortion and exploitation of the Adult Industry today. And its time to bring Christ into the picture.
Understanding the Wrong of Pornography
Pornography is a powerful medium of distortion and fantasy that devalues women, distorts sex and sexuality, and reduces the dignity of the person to become just a collection of body parts.
“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense.”
-Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2354
Pornography robs men of the capacity to give of themselves in a self-sacrificial way. Men are outward oriented and when it comes to sexual arousal, men are visually stimulated. Porn is thus far more appealing to men than it is to women and in that it is far more destructive. Engaging in pornographic behaviors is attractive to men because it makes them feel like a man without asking anything of them in return. It essentially cripples a man’s heart because it does not challenge them, asks nothing in return. It is all just taking, taking, taking.
If love is about self-gift, then pornography trains a man in lust where instead of giving one’s self to one’s beloved, one takes. Lust is found in many places today, but for teens who are going through puberty and trying to discover who they are in life, it represents a powerful twisting of the good and natural sexual desires into perversion. The great mystery and dignity of the human person is lost to the viewer of porn, and instead the person is reduced to simply their body parts. The great value of the whole person is nothing more than the other’s ability to gratify my needs. You do not have worth because of who you are, but only in what you can do for me.
I think every parent agrees that today it is hard to be a woman. Women are constantly thrown images of what beauty should look like from billboards, movies, and magazines, that they are consistently feeling like they cannot measure up. Depression and anxiety about their bodies is common place in elementary age girls now. In a culture that looks approvingly upon pornography, as youth culture undeniably does, there is now an added pressure on women to not just be “hot” or “sexy”, but to be sexually available. Sadly, we are seeing this effect the even the junior high party scene where sex acts, especially oral sex and group viewing of porn, is increasing in our community.
Pornography turns sexual intimacy into a commodity for profit. It turns women into objects. It turns men’s hearts to selfishness and lust. It breeds further sexual perversions, earlier ages of incidents of sexual contact in teens, and it looses sight of the meaning and dignity of sexual love between spouses. As Pope John Paul II so famously put it: "The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the person to only his or her sexual value."
Habits in the Dark: A Sad Look into the Addictive Nature of Pornography
“When pornography becomes a filter through which the rest of life is understood, serious damage occurs. A 2001 report found that more than half of all sex offenders in Utah were adolescents — and children as young as 8 years old were committing felony sexual assault.”
-Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family
This article seeks to draw attention to the reality of a silent epidemic that is alive and well in America: Teenage pornography addiction.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. To many that struggle daily with an addiction to pornography, those images, videos, and sounds are worth a thousand agonies as well. Many parents today are surprised at the addictive nature of pornography and are often tempted to treat the problem as simply a matter of will power.
When a teenager first encounters pornography and becomes sexually aroused, his body reacts to the stimulus in a very specific way. The image causes the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine, which enters the bloodstream. When this reaches the brain, it causes that image to be locked into the memory of the teenager. Often the adults who have struggled with an addiction to pornography over the course of years or even decades can still recall the first images that they saw as a child or teenager. The imprint of the image on the brain of the adolescent is significant. The mere remembrance of that image can cause arousal in the individual.
The rush of epinephrine and the surge of other pleasure inducing chemicals, such as dopamine and adrenaline, cause the porn user to experience a sexual high. The user seeks to return to this high, but finds that more images and a longer exposure to them is needed in order to experience that rush again. This leads to the formation of the habitual abuse of pornography and is often accompanied by masturbation.
As the habit becomes more ingrained and the seeking of this rush more difficult to achieve, the teen has probably viewed hundreds, if not thousands, of images and seen dozens of videos. At this stage it becomes compulsive.
The teen may also be experiencing intense feelings of shame and isolation, especially if the family and religious upbringing views porn negatively. These feelings tend to only drive the teen into further use, as the biochemical rush is also a means of temporary relief from stress or anxiety. The feeling of powerlessness over one’s life is increased, even more so when repeated attempts to stop viewing porn or to overcome past memories fails. The turning to pornography becomes a cycle as the teenager feels worthless after viewing it, but the worthless is what causes the teen to return to it again and again.
The most important message that a teen can hear at this point is one of healing and support. The addiction can be broken, but only by stronger means, such as counseling and yes, even medicine. The goal is moral freedom from lust, or in the language of Sexaholics Anonymous, "sexual sobriety." The longer the addictions are allowed to endure, the deeper the addiction takes hold of the person's psyche. It needs to be brought out into the light in order to find the revolutionary freedom that only purity, chastity and holiness can bring.
Better Parents. Active Parents.
Addictions, 100 billion dollar industries, and youth culture sustaining hedonism can seem like an impossible foe, but with our God “nothing is impossible.”
Parents, the worst thing you can do is not take action. First, have a conservation with your child about their online habits. Talk to them about sex, pornography, lust, love and real relationships. If you don’t, realize that the media already is speaking loudly, and chances are your values are being lost. Secondly, take practical steps to destroy the influence of porn. Remove all computers from bedrooms and have them in open, high traffic areas. Turn all screens towards the room and not the walls. Cancel certain cable channels, too. On your family computer, put software that monitors and/or filters internet content. Check your History folder often. If it has been recently cleared, that is usually a sign of someone hiding inappropriate online viewing.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the software available from www.xxxchurch.com called X3 Watch. This is an accountability program, not a filter, so it sends out a bi-weekly or monthly email to specific accountability partners (such as parents) containing flagged websites. Best of all, the scaled down version, which may be all you need, is free to download!
Finally, pray as a family. God is bigger than addiction, than lust, than sin. Through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ we have the strength to fight lust in our lives and bring all these things done in the dark into His merciful light. For it is only in the Light that we see the light, that we can see the wrongness of our actions and the experience the boundlessness of His merciful grace. Prayer every day, especially to Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, and to Saint Michael the Archangel, will lead to victory. But no one can overcome alone. Get a group together who can support you and your teen. They need someone that can hold them accountable, that can pray for them and lift them up with strong words.
Praise Him in the dust of our humanity,
Mike Gormley
AMDG
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
