"The Deepest Passion of the Soul is Meant for God"

I subscribe to Magnificat, a monthly magazine which provides the daily Mass readings, prayers for the morning, evening and night, meditations, essays, poems, blessings, the order of the Mass, short saint biographies, etc. I enjoy it, and a donor at my school provides so that all the sixth through eighth graders get a copy each month.

The meditation after Mass yesterday, January 30th, was a selection from Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College and an author of many books. It comes from his book, Back to Virtue, copyright 1992 and 2002 by Ignatius Press. On page 409 it says:

“First, remember a principle of God’s grace: God often withholds from us the grace to avoid a lesser sin because we are in danger of a greater sin. To avoid pride, he sometimes lets us fall into lust, since lust is usually obvious, undisguised, and temporary, while pride is not. So to conquer lust, we should focus less on lust and more on pride. Only when we are truly humble does God give us the grace to conquer lust.”

We live in a culture today that is ever increasingly lustful, saturated by sex, where more and more good men fall into this trap. What is the solution? How does one overcome this temptation and this sin? Peter Kreeft says that it is not by focusing on the lust; one needs to look more at the pride in one’s life. He continues:

“Second, remember Saint Thomas’ diagnosis of lust, which I think he must have learned from Saint Augustine: ‘Man cannot life without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.’ God is not a substitute for sex, as Freud thought; sex is often a substitute for God. The deepest passion of the soul is meant for God. When the true God comes, the false gods go. To conquer lust, forget about lust and love God.”

When the deepest passions of our souls are not directed toward God, when we have no spiritual joys, it is then that we seek satisfaction elsewhere. We seek joy in bodily pleasures, but of course those never really satisfy either. Since we don’t have God in our life, we put sex or other pleasures in His place. As I said in an earlier entry, sex is not bad; sex is good. Carnal pleasures are a good, but they need to be rightly ordered and directed by our mind and will toward the good. It is easy to be consumed with the constant pursuit of carnal pleasures and only grow in our selfishness as a result.

What Peter Kreeft says here resonates with my basic theory. My theory is that God made us, right from the beginning, to be His spouse, His bride, His temple, and His home. The man and the woman were to be God’s spouse by eating of the tree of life, which is having a heart which loves, trusts, and obeys God. He tested the man and the woman by saying be fruitful and multiply but don’t have sex. Wanting to be like God, wanting to create a man as God had just done, they disobey God and have relations. God wanted them to trust Him to provide as Mary did and have children virginally. Instead, they trusted in their own powers and had Cain.

Pride, as Peter Kreeft says, is worse than lust, but lust is much more common. Lust is a symptom that our love for God has grown cold. The solution to lust is to increase our love for God. The antidote for many of our problems today living in this culture of death is to realize the great dignity we have as children of God, as temples of the Holy Spirit, as creatures called into the closest intimacy with God Almighty, as the very brides of Christ, and love Him more, give ourselves to Him completely and renew that total self-gift each day, place all our hopes and desires in His hands trusting in His provision, look to Him as the source of life and our solace in life, cling to Him as a rock of safety in the raging storm, ask Him for what we truly need, seek from Him a greater outpouring of His Holy Spirit, knock at the door of His heart with the hands of our heart so that our hearts speak to each other, heart to heart.

If we fully devote ourselves to the love of God and do everything within our power to grow and develop in that love, all else falls into its proper place. Saint Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will.” If we spend ourselves in the love of God, lust and pride and jealousy and hatred and laziness all fall by the wayside to make room for the real thing. God is the real thing and the only thing that truly and fully satisfies. His satisfaction is not of the bodily sort; it is of the spiritual sort, which far outpaces the bodily. Being fully united to the Living God is the greatest joy; it is to begin to live heaven on earth.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
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