The Nature of Lust

one

What is the nature of lust?

Like food, human sexuality is a great gift from God. It brings together all our faculties for love, physical, emotional, parental, in a way that nothing else on earth does.

It reflects the love of the Trinity, where the love between persons proceeds into another Person and it serves as one of the primary images of God’s radical love for us, especially in Christ. So clearly, sexuality is meant to be directed to the ultimate human good of love.

Lust is where we lose that direction. It’s where we pursue sexuality that’s disconnected from, and even an attack on, our capacity for love.

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Unitive love

We are incredible people composed of both body and soul. There should be a symmetry with what happens at the level of our bodies and what happens at the level of our personhood. Otherwise, there’d be a lack of integrity, a profound dis-alignment between the two halves of what we are.

Well, sexual love is designed to be a total physical self-gift: one gives one’s whole body, and even one’s genetic makeup in the reproductive material to the other person.

But if it’s a total self-gift at the physical level, then that could only make sense in the context of a relationship of total self-gift at the personal level. Otherwise, we’d be doing something physically that didn’t reflect who we are personally and that’s just a lack of integrity.

So what is the relationship of total personal self-gift that can be the context for the physical total self-gift of sexuality?

Very simply, it’s called marriage. And sexual activity that happens outside of that complete personal love is simply a violation of the way the human person, body and soul, is structured for love.

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Procreative love

More than that, sexual activity is clearly directed towards having children and becoming a parent. That’s why our sexual organs are also called our reproductive organs, and why the sexual act is also the reproductive act.

There’s only one organic function that takes two people to be performed, and that is the reproductive function.

So when a couple comes together sexually, they are literally acting as a single organism, which is, of course, why the Bible calls it being “one flesh.”

All this means that any type of sexual activity which you do in such a way as to make reproduction impossible, is a misuse of this capacity to be united as one with the other person.

In other words, to reject the parental love of sex is, ultimately, to reject a key part of the spousal love of sex. And again, separating sex from love is just what we mean by lust.

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There’s always the temptation in human life to not love enough

The Church never condemns love, it only condemns not loving enough.

It condemns a sexuality that picks and chooses which part of the other person we will accept. If we reject their future, by not committing to them for life, if we reject their fertility by sterilizing some aspect of our sexual relationship, if we reject their uniqueness, their unfathomable depth, by going off to sleep with someone else, or if we reject their personality entirely by simply objectifying them with our eyes or imagination, then that’s not loving enough, and Jesus and the Church are calling you to do better.

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St. Margaret of Cortona is probably a saint you’ve never heard of but she is the perfect patron saint against lust.

Margaret possessed tremendous physical beauty and she craved affection. When she was sixteen or seventeen she fell in love with a wealthy young man and they began to live together. They had a son but never married. He was not the type of man who could make a mature commitment. Nine years into the relationship, tragedy struck. Her lover had gone on a hunting trip with business partners but did not return. Finally his hunting dog came back, tugging at her dress to follow him. She followed the poor beast very far into the forest where the dog directed her to her lover. He had been murdered by his hunting companions who were settling a debt and left to rot in the woods. At the appalling sight, Margaret was stunned like one struck by lightning. Filled with terror she asked herself, "Where is his soul now?"

In the decaying corpse of her former lover, Margaret was given a dramatic vivid image of what lust does to the soul.

Then and there she firmly resolved to change her life and like the Prodigal Son she returned repentant to God.

How can we do what Margaret did?

Remember that chastity is the virtue that conquers lust

St Augustine said: Chaste is the heart that loves without looking for reward.

●      Ti voglio bene

●      I want your good

●      Don’t settle for selfish love. Love as God loves.