Holy Hunger

"For paradise we long. For perfection we were made. We don't know what it would look or feel like, but we must settle for nothing less. This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives; it drives our ambition." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Much to my surprise, I keep being led to reflect on passages in this book that I've never written about before. Not exclusively, but still. 

For most sins, it's easy to see something good that has been corrupted. They tend to represent some basic human need that has become a disproportionate priority. Each of the seven deadly sins has a corresponding virtue identified as its cure or counterpart. Those virtues are not the need grown out of control, but the approach to bringing balance back into our lives. While Fr. Neuhaus isn't specifically calling out sin here, what he's expressing is the longing that can lead to several of the deadly sins, including greed, gluttony, envy, and lust. And he seems to be saying to be careful not to throw the baby out with the disgusting bath water. 

"The hunger is for nothing less than paradise, nothing less than perfect communion with the Absolute--with the Good, the True, the Beautiful--communion with the perfectly One in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together at last and forever. We must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled." - ibid.

Don't let the longing grow out of proportion into sin, but neither squelch it out. I've skipped the part about how our friendships and loves are unsatisfactory, less than whole efforts to fulfill this longing, because to me it's more important to remember how they give us the greatest satisfaction when we receive them in the context of the greater longing for the Perfect. Each time we allow God's love to form a relationship in our lives we must avoid the temptation to grasp it and twist it into something that meets only our needs and desires. When we do, we find that those become part of how God works in and through us to create a fellowship that is the smallest insight into the perfect one we will finally enter into one day. Sometimes we are privileged to work on the twisted parts of those relationships and let God make them more conducive to his plan for our eternal lives.

When I come back to read these words, I want to remember that they were written in a time of great turmoil, as Russia has invaded the Ukraine. Even Putin's desire to recreate (his flawed recollections of) Soviet glory has roots in something not entirely evil. Our battle is still spiritual, as is our enemy. (That doesn't at all mean that we should let him have his way.) Even though I am now too old to be required to fast on this Ash Wednesday, I have entered into prayer and fasting anyway, and am offering the hunger in my belly as a further prayer for the protection of the people of Ukraine and an unlikely change of heart for those who have undertaken this invasion.

Envying the "Good Thief"

I'm not leading off this post with a quotation right now, and if you just read one it's because I came back in and added it when I get that far in the book. Also, I've written a little about this thought before, from a different angle. But I have been thinking about the implications of yesterday's post and wanted to capture this thought.

I think it says a lot about our miscomprehension of sin that we either begrudge or envy those who experience deathbed conversions. "They're sneaking in at the last minute!" we protest, "It isn't fair!" When he told us that we can only enter the kingdom as little children, this isn't what the Lord meant! In fact, Jesus told an entire long parable about this issue so that we wouldn't miss the point. Still, we don't get it.

Maybe that's partly because, due to the creation narrative concerning our fall from grace, we view work as a necessary evil that we must bear, so neither we nor the workers in the parable consider meaningful labor as God's gift to us. Even when it's the incredible opportunity to share God's love with the beloved, we think of the labor as a chore. And secondly, because we have partaken of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (really? four "of's" in one phrase?) we decide for ourselves that sin is pleasant to engage in, and even good for us. As a result, we are jealous of those who "get" to partake in sin their whole lives and never "have to" do any work to promote the kingdom, yet still manage to squeak into "their heavenly reward" at the very end of their lives. 

I could offer the concept of Purgatory as a solution to this issue, and as a Catholic I believe it's a valid one with a good Scriptural foundation. But I think the point that Fr. Neuhaus is going to make, probably somewhere in this chapter, is a more pertinent one. The truth is that God has not and will not withhold from us anything that is truly good for us. He may be in the business of using even our sin to achieve his purposes, to bring us to our senses so we return home to him. But we are still better off when we choose to walk with him at every opportunity. The real reward of serving God in his kingdom and knowing his love even while we walk on this earth is that we get to know and serve God, which is a greater joy and blessing than any sinful temptation. 

And doing so doesn't make us less of an undeserving recipient of grace that the good thief or deathbed confessor. It just allows us to receive more joy as we journey through this world toward our eternal home.

I'm a thief!

"Recall now the two criminals. Mentioned in all four Gospels, they were called thieves by two of the Gospel writers. Whatever else they had stolen in their lives, the one, commonly called 'the good thief,' stole at the end a reward he did not deserve." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

I am convinced that the chief obstacle to Christians living our calling is our failure to realize that we are all, at best, the good thief. At whatever point we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we enter into the transformative journey to become Christ present in the world. And yet, rather than embrace the truth that we remain unworthy of the priceless gift that God has given us through Jesus, we often live our lives as though the purpose of our faith is to help us reach the point at which we no longer need a Savior. I'm pretty certain that isn't God's plan for us, but rather that we continually embrace our complete dependence on God's grace and mercy as poured out for us in Christ Jesus. 

We think of heaven as a reward, and indeed it is. But it is Jesus' reward, not ours. At our best moment, we are the good thief, undeserving of grace but receiving it because God is love and we, wretched though we be, are God's beloved sons and daughters. We deserve that no more than we do our own conception. 

Another lie

They've been the same from the very beginning, but what they all come down to is:

It's okay to decide for yourself (or, to all of humanity, among yourselves) what is right and what is wrong. 

Isn't that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? But what is the true, long-term fruit of that tree? Isn't it relativism?

I prefer to trust in my loving Father, who both knows and truly wants what is best for me, rather than in the mass of humanity whose chief interest lies in each of ourselves.

So when humanity insists that my sin is not so bad, a normal part of human nature, or even laudable and beneficial, it might appeal to my natural - and, I should be honest: selfish - inclinations. But it will not ultimately result in my becoming the person my loving Father dreams for me to become: the image and bodily presence of His beloved Son.

The arrogance of self-determinism underlies all the deadly sins and undermines all virtue.

Lies which the evil one uses

All of his lies are intended to make us disbelieve either our identity as God's children or our destiny in living in His love. In the broadest sense, they include:

• God's blessings are burdens.
• The things and actions from which God tells us to abstain are blessings.
• The remarkable things God has done in others' lives are beyond us.
• We are incapable of that to which God calls us.
• God's timeless truth is outdated ignorance.
• We have plenty of time to be obedient and trust Him. "It can wait."
• Living for the moment means putting off God's will for later.
• My sins are greater than others'.
• The particular way that I am disregarding God is not that important.
• A small and understandable disobedience is no big deal.
• Other's sins are greater than mine (or mine isn't really a sin).

(The critical reader may note that there is significant overlap among these.) Now, the specifics to which our adversary applies these lies vary greatly from one person to the next. But the general theme of them is the same in all of our lives, and they are all intended to keep us from embracing our identity and our destiny of beloved sons and daughters of a Father who knows what is truly best for us and reveals it through His Word and His Church.

So whether the thing with which we compromise be connected to lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride, let us renounce the lie beneath it and embrace God's greater plan for us as sons and daughters destined for eternal holiness.

The most effective lie . . .

. . . that our adversary uses to keep us bound to the spirits who torment us is that these things are a part of ourselves.

For instance, I am not, by my spiritual nature, bisexual, any more than any of us are by our spiritual nature promiscuous or insatiable. But by getting us to believe that this is a central part of who we are, our adversary gets us to embrace and cling to things from which Christ has set us free. The more we accept these things as part of our own nature, reinforcing them by choices and behavior, the more we become enslaved to them and, in a vicious cycle, the more we tend to see them as part of ourselves. In a case like mine, this can be true even if I remain very careful not to ever commit adultery because of this misconception. As long as I continued to hunger for sexual experiences which are not God's revealed will for me, I remained bound to the effects of this spiritual influence. (In this case, it is easy for anyone with spiritual discernment who knows my story to see how this spiritual influence entered by life. Sometimes we are completely aware of this, so we keep our story to ourselves, for a variety of reasons. This keeps us in isolation, darkness, and bondage.)

I believe the same thing can be true of physical and psychological manifestations of spiritual influences. It may be important to obtain the medical or psychological help we need, for a couple reasons. We may need to deal with our thought and behavior patterns, or the chemical effects that they have had in our bodies. We also need to keep the manifestation from pushing us to grow more unhealthy or to participate with worse, more destructive influences. In the latter case, these may also appear psychological in manifestation but have a spiritual influence or root. To completely get rid of them, eventually we are going to have to renounce the lie that this thing is a part of ourselves. 

But that renunciation won't take hold in us unless we are using all the keys Jesus has given us to spiritual freedom. Those spiritual influences entered our lives through decisions we made, sometimes in response to terrible things that were done to us and sometimes simply in sin. They come in, and they lock the door behind them, and they set up house and make us think they are a part of us.

It is a lie.

We must often discover the door through which we gave them access, so that we can renounce the decision we made or the lie we believed, or repent of the sin that let them in or kept us bound to them. ("It's okay for me to not forgive so-and-so, because what they did was terrible and hurt me deeply." And the accompanying lie that forgiveness is an additional burden rather than a gift God gives us once we trust that He will do in us what we can't for ourselves.) Once we do, in Christ Jesus' authority we can kick them out, and they have to leave. And we can take back the freedom we have yielded to them in our ignorance of our adversary's schemes. 

Once we are in Christ Jesus, the adversary has no power over us anymore except what we continue to yield to him. 

One of the other tricks he uses is to keep us from those who can help us see clearly. If we resent them for some offense that we perceive (even if they haven't actually done anything wrong), or if we think they're off base by attributing spiritual influences for stuff that can easily be explained without anything so mystical, then instead of turning to their help we are isolated in our battle. This is another of the adversary's schemes.

I'm preaching to myself here, btw. My own bondage can seem so attractive, and even when it doesn't it can seem like a natural part of me. God, please help me to always see it as You do.

My Exodus

All the day I am ashamed,
  I blush with shame
as they reproach me and revile me,
  my enemies and my persecutors.
All this happened to us,
  but not because we had forgotten you.
We were not disloyal to your covenant;
  our hearts did not turn away;
  our steps did not wander from your path;
and yet you brought us low,
  with horrors all about us:
  you overwhelmed us in the shadows of death. Ps 44: 14-19

For all that the Psalms express what we might be feeling, they also express things that will never be true for me. I will never be able to proclaim my faithfulness to the Lord's covenant. Yet that no longer torments me as it did. I know that the Lord is present with me in the desert, just as Jesus knew that He was present with the Father.

Dear friends, at every moment the earth is full of the mercy of God, and nature itself is a lesson for all the faithful in the worship of God. The heavens, the sea and all that is in them bear witness to the goodness and omnipotence of their Creator, and the marvellous beauty of the elements as they obey him demands from the intelligent creation a fitting expression of its gratitude.

But with the return of that season marked out in a special way by the mystery of our redemption, and of the days that lead up to the paschal feast, we are summoned more urgently to prepare ourselves by a purification of spirit.

The special note of the paschal feast is this: the whole Church rejoices in the forgiveness of sins. It rejoices in the forgiveness not only of those who are then reborn in holy baptism but also of those who are already numbered among God’s adopted children.

Initially, men are made new by the rebirth of baptism. Yet there still is required a daily renewal to repair the shortcomings of our mortal nature, and whatever degree of progress has been made there is no one who should not be more advanced. All must therefore strive to ensure that on the day of redemption no one may be found in the sins of his former life.
  
Dear friends, what the Christian should be doing at all times should be done now with greater care and devotion, so that the Lenten fast enjoined by the apostles may be fulfilled, not simply by abstinence from food but above all by the renunciation of sin. - St. Leo the Great, Pope

I think that it is because our pastors in recent decades have emphasized the three great Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that I have lost sight, a bit, of a fundamental part of this path to holiness: turning away from sin. Or perhaps it is because I have so consistently failed to do so, despite my intentions.

It is true that we are always to turn from our sin, that this is an every day calling for us. But this season calls us to refocus on that in the context of God's call to us. This time in the desert is part of our Exodus, by which God delivers us from slavery into His kingdom. It is good for me to partake of this manna, which can seem more like drudgery than the gift of God's sustenance, yet the latter is what it truly is.

Looming failure

actually, i have failed already; i just didn't "finish failing," as i tend to think of it. i'm resisting, but not with all i have and not fully relying on my Savior. i'm believing the lies that my failure is inevitable and that this self-indulgent pleasure is desirable, instead of renouncing them.

Stupid brain.

18 days? Really? Is that all the chastity and determination you have? you

Weak excuse of a man.

let me take this moment, then: in the Name of Jesus, i renounce the lie that i will inevitably fail at walking in holiness, and the lie that the pleasure i have sought my whole life is desirable; in the Name of Jesus, i repent of impure thoughts and fantasies, and of self-pleasure; in the Name of Jesus i renounce the spirits of bisexuality, carnality, adultery; in the Name of Jesus, i embrace the truth that i am weak, and i lean on His strength to accomplish in me what i have been unable to accomplish for myself; in the Name of Jesus, i break the hold of any spirit with which i have ever participated in these areas that i have renounced, and i command them to leave right now and never return, in the Authority of Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior.

Temptation and Sin

It is said that when we sin, temptation lessens.  For this reason, Jesus alone knows the full weight of temptation, because He never yielded to it. Many others know that power in one area of their lives or another, but perhaps no one but Christ has ever known it in their weakest area.

Or maybe it's also true that, when we sin, that particular temptation grows stronger the next time. Or does it just feel that way because the will is weak in that area? We probably can't be certain.

And it is probably not very useful to dwell on this overmuch.  In either case, it is with the beginnings of gratitude that I observe that purity requires diligence, along with a determination to trust God to do what I never have before. I haven't believed it impossible, but I have dismissed it as less desirable than carnality.

The reason it's important

If the objective of our life was primarily to avoid sin, it wouldn't much matter whether we did it by grace or by brute force of will. (Let us set aside for a moment the impossibility of the latter.)

But it isn't!

So the reason it's important to turn to God when we're feeling weak and vulnerable isn't just to be helped through whatever degree of crisis we might be facing, and the reason for turning to Him when we are feeling strong isn't so that we won't stumble when we're feeling weak.

It's a little like the incredulous question the late Fr. Neuhaus raises in Death on a Friday Afternoon, while he's speculating about whether God's desire for every beloved son and daughter of His to be saved might actually be fulfilled. He talks about those whose response to that possibility is worry about the benefit of walking with the Lord, then, if our destiny ends up being the same, if God's grace really manages to overcome every person's sin. I'm probably paraphrasing his response: What's the point‽ The point is that you get to walk with the Lord!!

No benefit we might think passes us by when we turn away from sin to walk more closely with Him comes anywhere near that of knowing the One who loves us like no other! And no righteous side effect of avoiding sin compares with this joy, either.

There are many who approach faith as if it is primarily about its beneficial effects on society. They are as wrong as those who elevate any other gift of God above the presence of God Himself. The second greatest commandment is important, but there's a Reason it isn't the greatest!

Why I fail

First off, you probably don't want to know this about me. (Cowardly Lion slowly reads from sign: "I'd turn back if I were you." No, really, you should.)

Secondly, and very importantly to me, I've never used this as an excuse for my own actions, and I'm not starting now. But it can be important to know how patterns in our life became ingrained us. That said, this pattern belonged to me before he seared it into my being. I have already repented of and renounced the actions of my youth when it began, and forgiven my forebears for their choices which left me vulnerable.

I've written before about the weekend when he transitioned from grooming me to sexually abusing me. This first incident, on Thanksgiving weekend of 1977 at the YMCA in NYC - so pardon me for never agreeing that it's fun to stay there - was also the first time he prevented me from leaving. I resisted his entreaties for the longest time before eventually submitting to them - and to my own arousal. He was right, of course, that first time: he was only asking me to do in front of him what I already did privately. My own choices are an important part of what made me vulnerable to him. But the pattern I'm now dealing with began to be ingrained into me as he stood there, between me and the door, until my "no" began to yield to "I don't think so," and eventually, "I suppose," resulting in the overwhelming pleasure of the orgasm, and the crushing shame.

Later, in his secret apartment in Baltimore, on multiple occasions he would physically overcome me to impose his will on me, but it still resulted in my cooperation in the end, with its invariable physical and endorphic (if that's a word and not just a band name) payoff. I don't say that anymore to heap blame on myself for something that wasn't my fault. But it's important to really understand how the pattern of eventually giving in became a part of me. I gave in before him, so I'd already invited in that spiritual influence, but he bound me to it when he stole the power from me to be able to not give in when I didn't want to, no matter how determined I was not to.

I am still responsible for my own decisions, though, and that really is the point of dredging up these ugly memories.

So now I take that power back.

That's one of the things I love about Unbound: if something was taken from you spiritually, you can take it back!

Four decades of failure . . .

. . . make failure feel inevitable. I'm sharing this now, when I'm not alone and not immediately tempted. Addicts and alcoholics in recovery mark the passing time of their sobriety and somehow eventually lose the sense that failure is certain. But the successful ones also have a support network of meetings, sponsors, etc.

Still, I believe in my deliverance by my Savior's power and authority, and I believe in a truth that is greater than my fear of failure - a fear which I continue to renounce in the name of Jesus. And, in my moments of "opportunity" to sin, I will have this reminder that each is also an opportunity to live as the redeemed and restored son of my loving Father, who empowers me by His very Spirit living within me because He is so crazy in love with me.

More follow up

Or: An area of weakness, humble faith, and fear of failure

One of the realities that Neal Lozano describes concerning deliverance, in the context of the Unbound model but also of deliverance in general, is that it "moves us from an area of bondage to an area of weakness." He says that this sounds bad, and he's right, it does, and he's right again: it isn't. When we know we are weak and we depend on Christ in those areas, then we are actually strong.

When we've struggled in an area for decades of our life, it can be a challenge to have faith that God will really provide victory in the long term. This is an additional reason why faith (along with repentance) is the first key to spiritual freedom: we must believe that God loves us and wants us to know the victory He has won for us. But this victory is different from everything we have learned about winning in our physical and professional lives. We learn that we are victorious when we work harder than our opponents and make our own skills stronger than theirs. It's Fr. Spitzer's "comparative identity" again: we know most of our victories in comparison to others' defeats. (I suppose that this previous post contains my best description of Fr. Spitzer's concept.) Our pride can come into play here, too: most of us want the affirmation that comes from knowing that we have accomplished what we set out to do.

Conversely, we may also need to renounce the spirit of fear - fear of failure - that can further complicate the dynamics of any area of our lives over which we have struggled unsuccessfully. Yielding to this fear can provide an entryway for a spirit of anxiety in our lives, as well. All of these things can be ours to deal with in the flesh, but they can also have a spiritual element that comes to inhabit them and hold us in bondage to our shortcomings. As I write about this, I feel the tension at the base of my skull building, confirming that these weaknesses and spiritual influences have been at work in my life for decades. And now I also recognize them as the schemes of my adversary to keep me from living in the power of Jesus' cross and resurrection in this area of my life.

When I trust that it is better to allow God's victory to have its way in my life than it would be to have any victory on my own, and I truly believe in God who truly wants me to know the joy of leaning on Him each step of the way, then in the Name of Jesus I can renounce the spirits of pride, doubt, fear, anxiety, and impurity, break the hold they have had over my life, and command them to go, and they have no choice but to leave, because I have both revoked the authority I may have previously given them to stay and embraced Jesus' authority over them, under which I am now living.

It may take some time for my own behavioral habit or tendency to fade, but as I turn to God in these moments of temptation, I trust that I will find that His strength will overcome my weakness. Indeed, I must never long for the day when I don't need Him for victory in this area, but rather desire to be more dependent on Him rather than more independent. In this way, I will develop a different habit and tendency to replace the one to which I have been bound for so long, which is a mere side effect of the greater gift of walking more closely with the One who loves me perfectly.

A physical/emotional response

I just noticed a strange and revelatory response I had (have, I'm pretty sure; it felt familiar) to a frequent thought. I was setting aside a temptation to engage in an impure thought process that leads me to sin, partly because I just received prayer for this area last night in preparation for this weekend's Unbound seminar. It was the most subtly sublime moment of grace-filled, Spirit-driven self revelation, concerning a physio-emotional response that I have to temptation. As I decided to not engage in this thought process, I felt the muscles at the base of my skull contract, and I noticed that I thought of why I don't want to engage in that thought process right now, as if I was reserving it to return to at a later time.

As I say, this felt familiar, and I considered other recent times that I have felt this physical sensation. It turns out that it has never been so much a rejection as a postponement of my tempting thoughts, and it is a reason I have not been able to persevere in purity in this area. I then considered when else I have felt like this: it also turns out that this response was seared into me when I was being sexually abused. It is directly related to my resignation to my physical inability to ever force my way past my stepfather to escape from the room when I was a teenager. It became part of the inevitability of my submission to him sexually, and subsequently of my submission to sexual impurity in general.

Wow. This is exactly the sort of red flag I should have learned about in one of my rounds of therapy. It's a question I would now ask of anyone who shared that they struggle in a given area: go back to the beginning of the latest incident, and let's go through how your body physically responded before you realized you were responding. Then: when is the earliest time you remember feeling that way?

I'm not going to assume that the battle is over now. But I understand something about it that I never did before, a physical and emotional and thought process that ties in with the spiritual aspect that I've tried to invoke previously. Perhaps, now that I have all four pieces, I can have lasting victory in this area.

A memory from out of the blue

I just remembered again how certain I was that God wasn't going to answer my prayers for my dad because of my sin. I didn't know, of course, that he was already dead.

I felt responsible for his death . . . even after (much) later learning that his death was self inflicted, although then for a different reason. I suppose that the emotional memories linger even after the understanding grows up.

Darkness

So when a man who freely discusses the facts of his childhood sexual abuse refers to some subsequent time as the darkest of his life, it serves to confirm the notion that the evil we do harms us far worse than the evil that is done to us.

On further thought: although my time in the 45323 zip code included the day that I was closest to ending my own life, even that was not the darkest day of my life. That time came before, to get me there. Because the evil we do is darker, even if we don't fully perceive the darkness at the time.

#whenIbecamewhatIabhor

More on how this works

The previous quotation, taken on its own, might give the impression that sin is stronger than purity. But this really gets back at the root of St. Paul's observations about the relationship between sin and the law. We can make purity into a new law, or an expression of the law, which puts us right back in the state of needing to adhere to every jot and tittle to remain in a state of righteousness. None of us can ever do it. So in that sense, a drop of sewage pollutes our whole lives.

But we have a Savior who has delivered us from the law, including the temptation to bind ourselves to a new law. Our purity is now not an effort to make ourselves righteous, but a loving response to both the righteousness and grace of Christ at work in our lives. That drop of impurity still has a soiling effect on us, to which we are not immune. The sacrament of Reconciliation provides a means for us to hear Christ express loving forgiveness as we turn away from our sin to be more fully transformed in Him.

A little purity does not go very far

A teaspoon of clean water does not purify a tall glass of sewage, but a teaspoon of sewage utterly ruins a glass of clean water. - Dale Ahlquist, writing for Crisis Magazine (post title is also part of quotation)

Yes. This.

Yet we must be careful not to dilute the message of grace as we approach this topic. Our purity is not our effort to be worthy of God's love, but is a gift God gives us in His love that we accept as we respond in love, as we trust that God's desire for us is greater than our own.

"Thy will" challenges

I started to make a list, but then realized that the seven deadly sins would do as a great starting point, allowing me to focus on ways I tend, or that I see others tend, to justify myself/themselves as I/they indulge the ones to which I am / they are prone:

• Sometimes it can be hard for my faith in God to be thorough. What if I'm wrong? Am I not then depriving myself of some desirable thing?
• They are struggling so greatly with that circumstance. Surely it would better - or more just - for them to have whatever thing they seem to need?
• If people will not choose to do the right thing, we'll simply have to make them.
• I can't help myself. 
• God understands.

Being conscious of these, in the moment, can be the first line of defense against them.

I had something I wanted to say

Now I just hope that when I have a moment to really revisit it I can still remember what it was.

Meanwhile, I remember reading this thought later, still rooted in the prodigal son's story: Sin does not just separate us from God; it also separates us from ourselves. - Neal Lozano, Abba's Heart

If we think about the nature of Jesus' temptations, we will see how this is true for us, too.