"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.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Barrenness is Death

The first reading of the first weekday of Ordinary Time comes from the first verses of the first Book of Samuel. The book starts with the mother of the great priest and prophet, Samuel, in great distress. She is unable to have children, and there is precious little that matters to Hannah if she cannot give birth to a child. Hannah is one of two wives to her husband, and “Her rival, to upset her, turned it into a constant reproach to her that the LORD had left her barren. This went on year after year; each time they made their pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the LORD, Peninnah would approach her, and Hannah would weep and refuse to eat” (1 Samuel 1:6). The other wife, Peninnah, rubbed it in that Hannah could not have a baby.

One point here is that children are considered a blessing in the Bible. In today’s world and culture, which is a culture of death, children are often considered a curse. This is the exact opposite of the mindset of the Bible. Children are always a blessing and gift from God, even if the manner by which they came about was evil or the timing of their arrival does not fit into our schedule.

The other side of children being a blessing is that, in the Old Testament, being barren is considered a curse. Barrenness is tantamount to death. Not passing on life, not having children, is to die and leave none of your life (children) behind. It is death. Virginity was not esteemed, and the inability to have children was a curse and reproach. There was little worse for a woman than to not have children.

Why do I make this point? I think it ties in with my main theory. The first man and woman feared death, and that is why thy sinned. The death they feared was not so much their own physical death, but it was their fear of not having a child. Not trusting in God and seeking to gain their life, to get a child, they disobeyed God and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, they had relations and conceived Cain, meaning “gotten.” They got the life they were seeking, and he turned out to be death.

It is the fear of death which leads to a life of bondage; Jesus took on our human nature so “that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (Hebrews 2:14-15). Life comes via the tree of life; the tree of life is our heart, and insofar as we trust, love and obey God, we have life. Barrenness is, in many respects, death, and God does want us to be fruitful and full of life. However, the point is that, ultimately, life comes as a gift from God, not from ourselves or our abilities. We have to love and trust Him for that life; the fear of death keeps us separated from Him. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.