Fasting Conquers Lust
One
The Goodness and Danger of Sexuality
Human sexuality is a great good. The love between man and woman can, through marriage and the consummation of marriage, employ every faculty of love: Mind, will, passions, and body, erotic love, friendship, parenthood, and even sacramental sanctification. All these are meant to have a place in that glorious kaleidoscope that is human sexuality.
But sexuality, and the sexual impulse, precisely because of their intrinsic beauty, are prone to become idols.
Even though experience shows us time and again that it backfires every time, there’s always the temptation to make sexual gratification the god to which we sacrifice all the other goods of life, whether spiritual, relational, or even physical.
Sex addiction, family brokenness, dissipation, loneliness, gender confusion, abortion, all this disorder comes from not getting the sexual impulse under control.
So how do we get it under control? What do we need to do?
Two
Realizing that Sexual Gratification is not Happiness
The first step to overcoming lust is to realize that sexual gratification and happiness are simply not equivalent. This should be really obvious whenever we read about someone arrested for illegal pornography or someone whose marriage falls apart due to a sex addiction.
Nobody wants to be those people. Nobody thinks of those people as happy. And those are the people who are willing to lose everything else so that they can pursue their own preferred modes of sexual gratification. Again, that proves that sexual gratification does not necessarily mean happiness.
But we also have plenty of examples of people who are really happy, even though they live celibately. An old married couple, who still delight in one another and their children and grandchildren, and in God, even though their days of marital consummation are over. Or take two of the most celebrated people in the last fifty years: John Paul II and Mother Teresa. Their happiness, and the supreme meaningfulness of their lives, were apparent to the entire world. They were happy. They lived really good lives. And active sexuality wasn’t part of the equation.
Our Lord Himself is the supreme model to follow if we want to be happy, and His celibacy is a timeless reminder that sexuality, while good, is not a supreme good and not a permanent good.
So the first step to getting a handle on the concupiscence of the flesh is to ask yourself: do I want to be happy? Or would I rather be unhappy, and sexually active a little longer? Because you can always choose unhappiness if you want. But you should be clear that when you make sexual gratification a priority, unhappiness is exactly what you’re choosing.
Three
The Technique of Bodily Mortification
Once you’ve decided that you don’t want sexuality to be your god, your master, or your tyrant, the next step is to work to attain mastery over your bodily urges. This is fasting, or physical mortification.
There are two great urges of the body: the urge for food, and the urge for sexual union. And here’s the good news, you can use the first to moderate the second.
St. Hilarian would warn his body, “If you won’t stop thinking about lust, I’ll go without eating for a while – that’ll make you think about food instead of sex!”
And this doesn’t mean you have to starve yourself, but if you don’t snack a couple days of the week, you might find yourself longing for snacks instead of longing for illicit sexuality. And, of course, there are other little bodily mortifications, where you teach your body that you are not a slave to physical pleasure.
Getting out of bed, for instance, within one minute of your alarm going off. Turning the shower just a little bit cooler than you like it. Drinking water at room temperature instead of chilled. Letting your coffee cool down a bit before you sip it. All these are ways of obtaining freedom from the flesh so that the soul is once again master of the body.
Mortification is indispensable for that freedom, and particularly for freedom from lust.
Four
Make it Pure: Don’t Diet
Physical mortification is meant to be a way of gaining strength over our urges, but also a way of showing God that we care more about following Him than we do about our own physical comfort or pleasure.
In other words, every mortification is supposed to be a gift to God, where we say, “I love You more than X.” So make that a pure gift. Don’t try to get a side benefit back from your mortification. You can diet, for instance, but don’t count the dieting as part of your mortification, since, after all, dieting is really still something you’re doing for the sake of the body.
Whatever you pick for your mortification should be for the sake of the soul. Because that’s the point of mortification, to subordinate the body to the soul, and not vice versa.
Five
Show God you love Him more than pleasure, and He will be generous in return.
It’s amazing how experience shows that even in this life, God will not be outdone in generosity. If you give Him a lot, He will give you more.
If you fight avarice by being a generous almsgiver, you’ll be amazed at how God gives you the grace of being less financially anxious. If you fight self-importance by being generous with the time you give God in prayer, you’ll be amazed at how much more time you seem to have for important things, how much more productively your time is spent. And if you fight concupiscence by being generous with mortification, you’ll be amazed at how much more you actually enjoy the basic physical pleasures God gives us every day.
So fight the obstacles to happiness with the tools Christ has provided. Fight concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life. And fight them with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
It’s not always an easy fight, but the payoff of freedom and joy can’t be compared to anything else.