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Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Sexuality and Romance —
and True Love

Those who do not have a sound palate,
but seek other tastes,
cannot taste the spirit and life of God’s words;
His words, rather, are distasteful to them.

—St. John of the Cross
The Living Flame of Love, 1. 5

 

Fear  |  Christian Lifestyle  |  Spiritual Counsels  |  Books  |  About CSF

 
Goodness | The Call Away from Sin | Cultural Brainwashing | The Allure of Common “Love” | Love is of the Spirit | Eroticism | Lust | Terror | Pornography | The Emptiness of Common “Love” | A Dream | Holy Matrimony: Real Love in Real Marriage | The Call to be Holy | Beyond Lack and Limitation | Freedom, not Repression

 

I ASKED the LORD, “O LORD, why is it that we are so troubled with genital arousal and erotic desires? Why does our sexuality have to be this difficult?”
   He replied, “No one enters My Kingdom who has not resolutely chosen the Spirit over the Flesh. Let your genitals be a constant reminder of this, in every moment, with every breath you take.”

GOD’S CREATION is good.

  

For You love all things that are
   and loathe nothing that You have made;
   for what You hated, You would not have fashioned.
And how could a thing remain, unless You willed it;
   or be preserved, had it not been called forth by You?
But You spare all things, because they are Yours,
   O LORD and lover of souls
   for Your imperishable spirit is in all things!

  

—Wisdom 11:24-12:1

Yet listen to what follows from this:

  

Therefore You rebuke offenders little by little, warn
   them, and remind them of the sins they are committing,
   that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in
   You, O LORD!

  

—Wisdom 12:2

 
The Call Away from Sin

God’s creation is good. God loves His creation. God created us to be good—to be capable of sharing in divine love. Knowing we have fallen into sin and disobedience, He still loves us. But does this mean that “anything goes” and that “everyone will go to heaven”? Well, no. God loves us by calling us out of our sins—the very offenses that separate souls from God in this life (and that separate souls from God eternally in hell) if they are not repented. When the Jews talked about God “wiping away sins,” they referred to God’s willingness to allow us to be reconciled to Him if we repented our sins. God’s willingness for reconciliation with us was later sealed with blood—Christ’s blood—as a contract, the New Covenant of Christianity.

Our part in this contract is to love God with all our mind, all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength.

Yet most Christians today love God only intellectually—with their minds—while their heart, soul, and strength is given over to the hope of feeling wanted and loved by the world. Oh, they love God, so they believe, but deep in their heart they are consumed by the lusts of the flesh.

 
Cultural Brainwashing

Our entire culture has been duped by the entertainment industry, an industry that for decades has been working subversively through movies and television to destroy traditional Christian family values and to glamorize the sin of lust in our culture. For example, it may seem on the surface that “the woman” has been idealized, because she stands at the center of all erotic imagery, but the underlying motive has been to defile Christian feminine modesty, stripping the female body of its holy dignity and reducing it, often with violent overtones, to a soulless sex object.

The end result is that our secular culture worships sexuality as its goddess, and all Christians, even those with same-sex attractions, are surrounded with temptation to abandon their baptismal promises and to partake of the harlot’s allure.

Today, even Christians have been duped by the anti-Christian “progressive” liberal agenda of the entertainment industry into believing that sin is normal and acceptable and that sexual pleasure is necessary for our happiness. As a result, instead of taking personal responsibility to detach themselves from social illusions, many Christians willingly consume them, over and over.

You have been duped into believing that you can use your own body to heal your emotional despair, and so sin enslaves you even as you are told that sin does not exist. You have been duped by anti-Christian cultural brainwashing, and you don’t even realize it. You continue to believe in what is impossible.

  

This concept of the impossible, can be approximated by the old Zen question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
 
For example, I have seen both men and women who have tried to seduce a woman to get from her the nurturing and attention they never received from their mothers. And I have seen both women and men who have tried to seduce a man to get from him the protection and attention they never received from their fathers. And in the end it’s all an impossibility. The moral is simple, and cuts across the board, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual: You can never seduce your despair, and you can never find real love through any form of sexual activity.
 
Thus, one does not need a “sex life” to be a good person. Notice, though, that a good person is not the same as a good citizen. A good citizen is a spiritually empty, insatiable consumer, and, because of the efforts of the advertising and entertainment industries, lust has become a prime consumer activity. So let’s give a round of applause to those industries Ah, can you hear it—the pathetic sound of one hand clapping?

  

 
The Allure of Common “Love”

In today’s world, all human cultures have, in one way or another, been seducing us into believing that Satanic perversion (“Do what thou wilt”) is not Satanic at all, but that it is just an innocent matter of human freedom. “I want what I want; I deserve it.” Therefore we believe that we have the “right” to reach out and take what we want.

Thus common “love”—or romantic love—has an unholy allure, though it differs for men and women. Men experience an aggressive desire to devour: to take from the other what they want until, like an overinflated balloon, they explode with an orgasm. Women experience a desire to be desired. They enjoy the power and satisfaction of seduction—of making themselves seen and desired—until they experience an implosion of orgasmic relief for finally being possessed by the desire of an other.

But consider this more deeply. What does all of this mean, psychologically? Taking what you want—making yourself seen—having power—feeling desired—being possessed. This all a psychological compensation for feelings of inferiority, weakness, and vulnerability. It’s all an immediate way of getting something to overcome the emotional hurt of childhood insecurity. Romance, therefore is a game, a way to even the score with the emotional pains of childhood.

Real love, in contrast, is not a game—it’s reality raised to the level of the divine.

  

True love is far more difficult than common “love” because true love is given, not received—and certainly not made—and it must be given with no expectation or hope of getting anything in return.

  

   
Love is of the Spirit

Now, you could use comparative anthropology to document all the varieties of human sexuality throughout history, the pagan delight in eros (erotic passion), the different cultural origins of polygamy and monogamy, and even the primitive origins of matrimony in the Hieros Gamos between gods and women. But none of it means anything, really, because Christ instituted a new reality for us, a reality based not on the flesh but on the spirit,[1] a reality based not on finding personal satisfaction in a romantic desire for another person but on serving others through holy love.

My love so delights the soul that it destroys every other joy which can be expressed by man here below. The taste of Me extinguishes every other taste; My light blinds all who behold it . . .

—as told to Saint Catherine of Genoa
Spiritual Doctrine, Part III, Chapter VII

The theological proof of this mystical understanding is obvious: look as hard as you can, but you will never find a single reference in the New Testament to “romantic relationships.” Sexuality has a temporal value in regard to the sacrament of Holy Matrimony for the sake of raising a family in holy service to God, but it has no enduring place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

  

At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven.

  

—Matthew 22:30 

Real love is not self-indulgence. Real love does not plead with desperate, hollow eyes for recognition from an other. Real love never turns to hate. Real love never becomes a cult. Real love never ends.

Why? Because real love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas explained, is “to wish the good of someone.” [2] Real love is an act of will. Real love is, as Christ showed us through His personal example, total sacrifice of self for the sake of the salvation of others.

 
Eroticism

Eroticism has its basis in human survival. Our sexual organs have a natural, erotic potential so that primitive men and women would be inclined to copulate and reproduce. But this natural tendency is the result of Original sin, not of God’s original plan for humanity. So, as humanity matured, God gave us His commandments to protect us from the raw desires that make the body into a fetish, desires that cause us to see our reproductive organs as nothing more than the means to enjoy a raw pleasure severed from moral responsibility to the divine. Consequently, without God’s guidance, we are led by our desires far astray from the holy purpose God intends for us.

  

If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving Him, and walking in His ways, and keeping His commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish.

  

—Deuteronomy 30:15-18a

And so, despite its glamorous portrayal in popular entertainment, eroticism is not love. Eroticism is not an expression of a man and a woman bonding into a family by their mutual love for God. Eroticism strips sexuality of its divinely intended function—reproduction—and reduces it to an exchange of using and being used. Eroticism is a form of idolatry—a body adoring a body, an expression of the lowest levels of desire—the allure of which resides in immediate, tangible gratification. Eroticism turns your heart away from God and leads you astray to serve the illusory glamor of lust.

Moreover, as the blatantly dark Satanic side of eroticism shows us, lust has at its core a rejection of the Holy and a desire for the domination and defilement of others. Consider the most common curse in contemporary society: “F*** you!” Does that give you a clue? Consider also that Satanic rituals are conducted in the nude. Does that give you another clue? Social nudity is not an experience of a “natural” truth of the body; it is not “honest,” and it does not mean that “nothing is hidden.” Instead, it uses the lure of bodily gratification to draw attention away from the truth of the soul and to defile the soul’s opportunity to grow pure in chaste love.

 
Lust: Erotic Arousal

Even the desire to erotically arouse another person in the context of romance is not an act of giving. The deep psychological truth is that such a desire masks a more hidden desire: to manipulate someone because you have been manipulated by others. That is, because you as a child felt the helplessness and resentment of being emotionally and physically manipulated by your parents, as an adult you will unconsciously compensate for this helplessness by seeking out ways to manipulate others. You can do this with wealth, you can do this with politics, you can do this with education, you can do this with social status, you can do this with physical strength, and you can do this with lust. Sad to say, therefore, the thrill of arousing lust in another person is really an act of self-serving power over that person. 

Therefore, the unpleasant truth is that all sexuality not ordered to its natural function—reproduction— is predatory. Acts such as masturbation; oral sex; anal sex;[3] and interrupted coitus, or “pulling out” are all disordered to the natural function of sexuality. It may seem that someone is “making love” but all he or she is doing is “feeding on” the erotic pleasure of another person. With reproduction taken out of the experience, all sexual acts becomes defiled as lust and reduced to an act of devouring.

 
Terror

Terror overcomes any creature in danger of being attacked and devoured. In such a situation, higher creatures will fight for their lives; lower creatures will try to squirm and wiggle to freedom. This terror has such a profound place in the human psyche, even in childhood, that it appears in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, two children threatened with being devoured by a witch in the forest.

This theme of being devoured also has a metaphorical aspect. When children grow up in a dysfunctional family environment—an environment characterized by such things as dishonesty, criticism, manipulation, and violence—the children are not actually in danger of being roasted in an oven and eaten, but they do experience a psychological devouring of their identities by their parents, such that the children’s social success as adults can be crippled.

Moreover, if the family dysfunction extends into the realm of sexual abuse by family members or other adults, the children experience the terror of sexual molestation.

  

The terror of sexual molestation has entered into folklore as tales of molestation by an incubus or a succubus during the night. It can be horrifying to experience the danger of having one’s body and soul devoured and possessed by a demon.

  

Childhood molestation is a grievous crime because the unconscious terror of a helpless child being devoured by an adult persists throughout the child’s life and causes massive disorder through attempts to numb the fear and pain with drugs and alcohol. Sexuality can even be used in an attempt to hide the terror of molestation; in such a case, a person may even enjoy it consciously, but unconsciously the person is really inviting molestation and acting out self-loathing.

Although sado-masochistic sexual acts exhibit this dynamic most explicitly, and pornography reveals the dark hostility hidden behind all the seeming pleasure, the unpleasant (and politically incorrect) truth is that all sexuality not ordered to its natural function—reproduction—is predatory. So, however much you might think you enjoy the pleasures of common love, you are really trapped in the hidden terror of making yourself into someone’s prey.

 
Pornography

Pornography, in its own subtle way, derives from the urge to “use” someone for your pleasure because, as a child, you were “used” by others. On the surface, it may seem that pornography is simply about erotic pleasure. But when the human body is made into a biological toy, it is stripped of all human dignity, and this defilement is an act of aggression. The hostility may be unconscious or it may be openly violent, but, either way, it has its basis in resentment.

So, to whom is the resentment directed? Well, as in all things psychological, the resentment goes back to the parents. Deep down, under all the apparent excitement, and despite the attraction to what is seen, lurks the dark urge to hurt and insult—to get revenge for—what is behind the scenes: a mother who devoured, rejected, or abandoned, rather than nurtured, or a father who failed to teach, guide, and protect. Thus, when you feel resentment for feeling deprived—deprived of recognition, guidance, acceptance, resources, or time—you are drawn to pornography, and even though it may feel exciting, you are really defiling someone.

  

Have you ever wondered why you are drawn to pornography even though you know it is evil and can tell yourself that it is wrong? Well, it’s the revenge you crave—the subtle revenge of using others as you have been used. So long as your emotional pain and resentment stay hidden from your conscious awareness, you will be drawn to pornography through an unconscious and irresistible attraction.

  

Learn how to stop the urge to look at pornography 

 
The Emptiness of Common “Love”

The Christian sacrament of Holy Matrimony protects the holiness of a living sexual activity (i.e., sexual activity that is open to procreation) within a marriage blessed by the Catholic Church, but all other sexual activity is just a dead, bartered transaction, an empty game, a form of narcissism which rejects the true love in which God created us. This narcissism consequently defiles the soul’s mystical union with God.

In this adulterous betrayal of God, common “love” does nothing except make your “partner” into an object of your own pleasure so as to seduce the despair of your own emptiness. Yet the price for using common “love” as a temporary escape from emptiness is everlasting emptiness itself: eternal separation from God.

The psychological proof of the emptiness of common “love” can be found in all botched “relationships”: what starts out sweet turns sour—that is, once your needs are not met, this common “love” suddenly switches into hatred and spite. But true love, as I said above, never turns to hate and never ends.

  

It’s simply impossible to fill our own bodily emptiness with an external presence. We can’t alleviate our emptiness with food, or cigarettes, or erotic fantasies, or sports, or entertainment, or anything else generated by our culture. Our lack can be filled only with the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Body of Christ is faith, by which we see the invisible Father in the visible appearance of bread. And the Blood of Christ is love, for there is no greater love than to shed your blood to save someone from destruction.

  

 
A Dream

A man in treatment for depression, and for many years caught up in sexual addictions, had a dream.

  

As he was walking through vast, empty fields, suddenly a great wall loomed up before him; it had the appearance of shimmering, crystalline light.
    He approached a door. On the ground was a metal bucket filled with tiny transparent crystals, like sand, but stained and discolored, and with a stench worse than rotting fish. He knocked on the door.
    A voice from the other side answered. “You may not enter. Go away.” After a pause, it continued. “The price of entry is tears of love, cried out in prayer. Look down at the bucket by your feet. That is what your life has amounted to; that is all you have to offer: a bucket of rotten orgasms.” And he woke up.

  

 
Holy Matrimony: Real Love in Real Marriage

Now, if you want a good image of Holy Matrimony, take a piece of string about a foot long and tie two small weights to the string, one weight on each end of the string. Then stretch the string out on a table. What happens? Nothing. All right. So now grasp the string in the middle and lift it straight up off the table—and, as the weights are lifted by the string, they will swing together. 

In a similar way, a marriage blessed by the Catholic Church is not made by a man and a woman drawing themselves together by their own efforts. Holy Matrimony is made when a man and a woman, through their mutual love for God, welcome Christ into their lives to lift them up into divine love and service. Holy Matrimony, therefore, never ends because it does not begin in the individuals—it begins in the eternally enduring covenant of love between God and humanity.[4]
 

Read more about Jesus’ teachings 
on sexuality and matrimony 

 
The Call to Be Holy

And, believe it or not, that eternally enduring covenant of love is what the call to Christianity is all about, whether in Holy Matrimony or in celibacy. As Christ emptied Himself in order to become human—to bring forgiveness and to show us love—so we must empty ourselves of all that is not love in order to be drawn up into divine love, to become holy, and to lead others to holiness. Be holy, for I am holy (Leviticus 11:45, 19:2, 20:7; 1 Peter 1:16; cf. Matthew 5:48).

  

Do you think that God’s commands are some arbitrary set of rules created by dictatorial whim? The commands flow from love, to protect us from defiling love.

When Saint Paul warned us that by works of the law no one will be justified he meant simply that justification—that is, redemption—is not a magical process. A mere legal or ritual act, performed simply as an act, has no meaning. Justification is about love on God’s part for our sake, and our response to that love has to come from the heart. Even the celebration of the Eucharist is not a mere act—it’s a liturgical act, the work of the people. And it is hard work.

The proof is in Christ Himself. “Love one another as I have loved you,” He said. Did He cheat us, lie to us, kill unborn children, or desire the death of His enemies? Did He use us for His sexual pleasure or to find “self-fulfillment”? No. Instead He suffered for us, as an act of mercy. In His Passion He showed us what love is—and what it has always been: a call away from sin into holiness. And then He called us to live a life of love, within Him, free from our own identities. Thus Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I live now is not my own.

  

 
Beyond Lack and Limitation: The Supernatural Mystical Experience

Jacques Lacan, in his writing (see the book Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne and the chapters “God and the Jouissance of The Woman” and “A Love Letter”) speaks of the psychoanalytic concept of “lack.” Although he uses some complicated mathematical imagery and abstruse psychoanalytic language to describe the matter, this concept of “lack” could be summed up theologically by saying that we cope psychologically with our human brokenness—that is, our separation from God—by using illusions to create for ourselves experiences of comfort in the midst of our misery. The illusions are varied, such as food, drugs, romance fantasies, sexual activity, sports, militarism, and politics, and the comfort can take the form of pleasure, pain relief, social acceptance, and personal valuation.

Lacan points out that one “side” of life is characterized by the use of this dynamic of illusions/comfort as an unconscious compensation for our brokenness. Moreover, Lacan demonstrates that there is another “side” of life that isn’t trapped in lack but that experiences something very real, albeit “unknown.” Lacan speaks of this experience as something that some women have encountered; it’s an ecstasy they experience without knowing what it is, and so Lacan refers to it as something “beyond sex” and thus as something mystical. Furthermore, Lacan states that even though most men are trapped on the “lack” side of life, some of them also encounter the mystical experience.

Note carefully that Lacan spoke as a psychoanalyst who was concerned with issues of neuroticism and sexuality, and so he didn’t elaborate on his ideas as theological concepts. Nevertheless, to speak theologically, it can be said that the side of life not trapped in lack is the place of mystical religious experience, and that it is characterized not by futile efforts of compensation for what is lacking but by a real experience of a fulfillment of a yearning for God.

Hence we can define mystical ecstasy as a prescient experience of a complete union with God.

Because the mystical experience is beyond sex, both men and women can be mystics; nevertheless, more women than men tend to have mystical experiences. This can be explained by the fact that anyone who preoccupies himself or herself with illusions of compensation is obstructing the mystical experience. In the past this was true of most men, and it is still true of most men today. And, in the past, many women were not drawn to these illusions. But today, sadly, because of social efforts in regard to “women’s liberation,” more and more women are being “liberated” into sin and are crossing over into the use of illusions typically used by men.

Nevertheless, women who value the supernatural—rather than shake it off as a burden—can have a special role in their spiritual influence on men. In the book of Genesis we are told that the desires of man’s heart are evil from his youth (see Genesis 8:21). In other words, both men and women are prone to all illusions as a fact of (fallen) life, just as much today, in the modern world, as in the past. Women, however, can be the glory of man (see 1 Corinthians 11:7). “Woman is the glory of man” means that when women seek the mystic way of life—that is, a way of life governed not by an attempt to compensate for lack and limitation but by a profound embrace of the fullness of God’s love—they renounce illusions for the sake of an experience that is beyond sex, and so they take up a God-given spiritual authority to relate to men with a real love that puts men in their proper spiritual place of loving God rather than loving illusions.

Consequently, the containment of men’s proclivity to using illusions of compensation can take place through the supernatural help of women yearning for the mystic life. If a woman detaches herself from worldly approval, renounces lust, dresses modestly, and acts in all things with humility she will be of glorious spiritual help to men.

Thus when both women and men seek the supernatural side of life they participate in an equality that the trite illusions can never attain.

 
Freedom, not Repression

The mystics learned this lesson of the call to be holy, and they learned something else, too. They learned from personal experience that, just as the Apostles preached, you only come to understand the truth of these things by submitting to them. It’s freedom, not repression.

  

My brothers, remember that you have been called to live in freedom—but not a freedom that gives free rein to the flesh.

  

—Galatians 5:13

So if you aren’t willing to give up everything—including any sexual “identity”—you are holding back something from your service to God. You’re trying to serve two masters, as it were, and thus you cut yourself off from receiving all the graces God has to offer for the sake of your salvation. Sadly, if you withhold anything—whether it be eroticism, or wealth, or power, or intellectual presumption, or even the pride of wanting revenge on those who hurt you—from the work of your spiritual purification, there will always be in your heart some dark selfishness which resists true love and holds you in slavery to disobedience.

  

Esau sold his birthright for a serving of stew (Genesis 25: 29–34), and many Christians today are just as willing to sell their birthright—their baptismal birthright—for an orgasm.

  

That’s why a culture of sex—in which reproductive sexuality has been stripped of its life—dooms itself to being a culture of death.

Read an opinion of dissent . . .

 

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Notes.

1. That is, the body does not have meaning in itself; the body has meaning in its being the temple of the Holy Spirit.

2. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. I-II, 26, 4.

3. Acts or fantasies of anal penetration pull us away from spiritual responsibility into a realm of anger and self-loathing reflecting—or even compulsively re-enacting—those times when we weren’t unconditionally accepted as infants or children. The erotic element of such acts or fantasies ironically derives from the anger of having been made into an object—indeed, a piece of garbage—as a child, in which all human dignity was surrendered and defiled. Thus, behind all the seeming eroticism, is a dark urge to defile the other or to be defiled yourself. These acts or fantasies, therefore, lead you right into the psychological dead-end of sado-masochism, for in their deepest psychological sense they represent a “worship” of putrefaction and death as a psychological defense against the fear of death, and consequently they defile any responsibility to life itself. Therefore, putting genitals (that have the God-given purpose of serving reproduction and life) into the place of putrefaction and death is the sexual equivalent of defiling the Blessed Sacrament in a satanic Black Mass.

4. See, for example, Isaiah (54:4-8; 62:1-12), Jeremiah (32:36-41), Ezekiel (16:1-63), Hosea (2:4-25), and the Song of Songs. The writers of these works all use motifs of the pagan eros, easily understood by the secular cultures to whom they wrote, to explain God’s love for Israel.

 

Books from this website

 
The text of this webpage, integrated with other material from my websites, has been conveniently organized into a paperback book of 350 pages, including a comprehensive index.

 

Though Demons Gloat: They Shall Not Prevail
by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D.

 
Though we are attacked by liberal activists from without and by apostasy from within, the true Church—that is, the body of those who remain faithful to Church tradition—weeps, and she prays, because she knows the fate of those who oppose God.
     Our enemies might fear love, and they can push love away, but they can’t kill it. And so the battle against them cannot be fought with politics; it requires a pro­found personal struggle against the immorality of popular culture. The battle must be fought in the service of God with pure and chaste lifestyles lived from the depths of our hearts in every moment.

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