The Lure of Disorder

One

The discipline needed for beauty

Beauty is where we allow ourselves to be surprised by things being right, by things being good and orderly and true. But to continue being surprised at the goodness of something takes work. It takes discipline.

It’s a paradox of human existence that you have to know a lot about something to be surprised and fascinated by it, to really appreciate it.

That’s why somebody who only knows the rules of football but doesn’t really know anything else about it will find it boring. In fact, they might think every game looks the same. But somebody who has been playing and watching football all their lives will often say, “Oh my gosh, that was incredible! I’ve never seen a play like that before! That was beautiful.”

In other words, you have to invest. You have to keep learning about something if you want to be able to continually appreciate its deepest levels of beauty.

That’s true of your spouse, it’s true of your kids, it’s true of your faith, and it’s true of everything. But if you’re lazy, you’ll get bored by things working the way they’re supposed to. And that’s when we get the temptation to delight in disorder and perversion.

Two

The facility of surprise in disorder

We were made for the thrill of surprise but God wants that thrill to be a response to goodness and truth. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that it’s easier to get that thrill not from things going right, but from things going wrong. 

An easy way to escape from boredom into surprise, much easier than working to perceive ever deeper levels of order, is to just go against the nature of things. 

A man who eats meat and vegetables isn’t doing anything surprising, but a man who eats books is doing something surprising. A woman who passes you on the street and smiles politely isn’t likely to surprise you, but she’ll surprise you if she suddenly punches you.

Now these examples may seem bizarre, (and they are), but it’s a fact that fallen humanity has a strong attraction to the bizarre.

Think of how many people watch horror movies. Think of how many people used to pay money to see “circus freaks,” that is, to entertain themselves by looking at people who suffered from particularly gruesome handicaps. 

The point is there has always been, and still is, a strong impulse to use our free time, our leisure to enjoy what is really messed up. And that’s an impulse that will destroy our souls if we let it.

Three

Enjoying what’s “messed up”

We aren’t monsters. We were made for surprise, we were made for our lives to be exciting. But when we isolate that impulse and then gratify it on its own, the result is pure perversion.

So where do you get your stimulation from seeing things go wrong?

Do you indulge in disturbing, gross literature, or movies, or tv shows? Crime shows, where you root for the utterly depraved criminals or shows that alternate between sexual sin and violence? Do you watch documentaries or reality shows that are mostly about people being immoral, dysfunctional, broken, and unhappy? Do you spend hours watching or reading news focused on how the world order or the global economy or the Church itself is falling apart?

This is not good. It’s not what God wants for you. It’s not happiness. It doesn’t prepare you for union with God and heaven, and it doesn’t even make you equipped to deal with the ups and downs of every day. 

The only solution is to cut it out.

Four

The downward spiral of perversion

Taking delight in perversion is a horrible trap. It’s a downward spiral of needing more and more perverse things to get you interested.

This is particularly the case with pornography, where you start out just wanting a cheap thrill, but before you know it the content has to get weirder and weirder, more and more disordered, for you to get excited.

The same goes for finding entertainment in perversion. It’s subject to the law of diminishing returns. You get used to what’s shocking, that to experience any surprise you continually have to find something even more shocking. The logical outcome is that you get to a place where the only thing you are looking forward to is a perversion or horror more horrible than the one before. And that’s nothing other than the beginning of hell on earth.

Five

Regaining innocent pleasure

If you’re into disordered entertainment, you have to see that this is preparing you not for heaven, but for hell. But there’s still time to pull back, still time to turn around and start on the long, difficult road of self-denial. 

Walking that road isn’t any fun, and it feels like it goes on forever, but at the end of it you’ll be back to innocence. And after that, you get the feeling you thought you’d never have again: delight in the beautiful.       

The first step is to identify where do I indulge in disordered pleasure? And then you have to cut it out. Because not only is disordered pleasure addictive and progressively destructive, but it also takes away your capacity to enjoy ordered pleasure.

A man can’t see the beauty of his wife when he’s been filling his mind with bizarre sexual imagery. A woman can’t see the beauty of her kids when she fills her mind with entertainment full of gossip and dysfunctional family relationships. And you can’t see the beauty of the world or the beauty of Christ’s kingdom when you spend your time reading about corruption in the government or in the Church.

So you may think that if you cut out your disordered entertainment there will be nothing left of any interest. But it’s not true. 

Cut out the disorder, cut out the ugliness, and slowly, slowly, your eyes will open again to the beauty all around you.