Francis Berger shares with us a comment that a reader left on his blog concerning sex, or love, or … something.
As far as the commenter was concerned, sex opened up possibilities for elevated expressions of love between people. He then added that the “gender” of the individuals participating in such elevated-love sex sessions was entirely irrelevant. In his mind, the biggest problem with sex in the modern world is its vulgarization via pornography. He then noted that very few young people were having sex today before asking me what I thought that indicated.
This idea that the sexual act opens up possibilities for elevated expressions of love between people is entirely backwards, and usually deliberately so. For a start, there are various types of love such as agape and philia. Neither of these two examples should have anything to do with the sexual act. As regards to eros we are talking about sex, but the tragedy today is that for most people this has become twisted and warped in lies.
When a man and a woman join together and their love produces a child, we call that entire experience the act of procreation. In other words, we are assisting God in His creation. He creates life through us, so we are willing participants in His ongoing love for humanity. God created us in His image and it is in this creation of a family that we most resemble Him.
But any sexual encounter that does not lead to procreation is instead a mockery of God and His love for us. Satan greatly desires to pervert that which God loves. Today we can look around and witness for ourselves the blatant results of several decades of unfettered perversion, of the deliberate equating of lust with love.
After returning to the real Catholic Church I confessed my sins in this department, a confession which took several sessions as my understanding of sin began to mature. With that added maturity I now look back on my first confessions of sins against the sixth commandment as being somewhat unsatisfactory in nature, precisely because I was unaware of just how bad my behavior had been.
When we are baptised we are joined to the Holy Spirit. Before our baptism, we belong to Satan through the original sin of Adam. But when we commit our first mortal sin then the Holy Spirit is forced from us until we go to confession and receive Holy Communion. I committed my first mortal sin at the age of thirteen and it was indeed a sin that was sexual in nature. Immediately afterwards I felt a great sense of guilt descend upon me, a guilt that bore an incredible weight. But the next time that I sinned the guilt was lesser in nature, and it became lighter and lighter as my sins increased, until it was nowhere to be found.
I had numbed my spirit to the point where daily sin was not just possible but it was needed so as to fill a void which I did not understand existed. And because at the same time my parents had divorced and we had stopped going to Holy Mass, I was also cut off from the possibility of returning to God’s grace. I did not return for over thirty five years, a long time to be lost.
The commenter at Francis’ blog is not wrong in one sense, and that is that through the sexual act a husband and wife bond together. This continues long after the sexual act itself, the two become as one. The two open themselves up to each other in a spiritual sense; it has to be this way when you consider the act as procreation in cooperation with God.
But what then of a perversion of the sexual act, which is the desire of Satan. Well, you still bond with that other person but now in a manner that is not in accordance with God, and that bond still continues long after you have laid with that person, and you are also thus spiritually bound with all of the other people that your partner laid with before you.
This is how a person can fall into great evil and even become possessed. I witnessed this happen to a white colleague when I was working in Uganda, and I detailed this in my first book, Pushing Rubber Downhill. He slept with prostitute after prostitute in a desperate attempt to discover boundaries in a country that had none. And he went mad in real time. And he was sent back home where he killed himself not long after.
And now I understand what actually happened to him. And that should scare you because it sure as hell scares me. Satan has used and continues to use sex to ensnare souls and cut them off from God, and he uses this more than any other sin. It is the gateway drug to spiritual damnation of our age. How rare and precious is the virtue of chastity today. Remember that when the next preacher of lies comes slinking in to convince you of the wonders of elevated love through sex.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.