Pints With Aquinas - Struggling with Sexual Sin | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines for the Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about healing from and growing beyond habitual sexual sin. When you hear habitual sexual sin, naturally you think of pornography and masturbation. A sin with which many, many men struggle and quite a few women struggle as well But a sin that can be super insidious Because given that it's addictive

Super hard to break the habit But also it gets under our skin to the core of our person and seems to convince us that will never be beyond this Baseness or that will never be beyond this moral ugliness, that it will just come to characterize us, that it will come to define us. So I think in this instance, it's important to speak into that space, to speak a word of encouragement, to speak a word of hope, not just in like tips and tricks, but in helping to situate this struggle within the setting of one's ongoing conversion, within the setting of the story of salvation as it pertains to you, because God has a plan for

your life, even amidst the struggle with sin and vice. And it's a good plan, and it's a plan which will come to its term, which will come to a successful issue. So let's think about it together. Here we go. Okay. So I think a great place to start in this conversation is with repentance. And here I think of the biblical notion, and maybe you've heard this word, metanoia, or

you've heard some form of this word, metanoia. A rough translation, a kind of literalistic translation might be, you know, to think beyond or to envision beyond or to abide beyond. And the reason I bring this up is because we hear in the sacred scriptures that we're meant to put on the mind of Christ, or that we're meant to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. And this means that to receive the preaching and teaching of the gospel and to be transformed thereby doesn't mean just to raise the stakes of our moral lives or to add further items to our list of

things to do. It means that we can actually abide in a world beyond, that we can come to know God and that we can come to love God with His own knowledge and love of Himself. So it broadens the horizon of our human experience and it breaks us out from a narrow circle, a kind of dread logic of sin and vice. But that will mean, you know, that we have to lay claim to it and that we have to be able to think beyond, to envision beyond, to abide beyond the present. And so, yeah, by faith, right? Our minds gain access to things eternal, to God and all things in light of God. But we're going to have to address the sin and the vice, which

keeps us from living there. An image that I like to use is rearranging the furniture in a room. So think of maybe your dorm room when you moved in, maybe you bunked the beds and got a little love seat and then whatever just started piling clothes in a corner of the room. And then maybe a couple of weeks later you visited one of your friend's rooms and discovered that wow, you can like loft the bed and make a sweet little cave for your desk and then have a cool little light over here and some posters over here and whatever else. And you're like, wow, that's awesome. Maybe I should do that for my own room. But then you realize the effort that it's going to take. And then you're like, nah, my room's probably fine. And maybe I can, I don't know, incorporate some of that.

The next time I set it up and blah, blah, blah. So we have any number of reasons for kind of sticking with the status quo and not challenging the decisions that we've made that we have perhaps come to regret or repent of. So I want to say this can be an opportunity when struggling with habitual sin to re-envision your life, right, to lay claim to the gift of faith and to the thinking beyond which that gift of faith and to the thinking beyond which that gift of faith begets. And then this can have very practical implications for how you live that life.

So we take a lot of the kind of givens of our life as if they were genuinely given and yeah, that they couldn't be changed or that they can't be changed when in fact they're not given and they can be changed in many instances. Like, do you need to keep working at this job? Do you need to have access to this phone? Do you need to live in this apartment? Do you need to hang out with these friends? Like I ask all these questions, not to like guilt you into making sudden and

drastic changes in your life, but simply to pose the question, what do you take as a given and is it genuinely given? Right. Oh, well, I need a smartphone for like the GP, get a GPS, get a Garmin. Well, I need the smart for like two factor authentic. How many things do you actually have two factor authentication on? You know, can you just use a phone as I mean, like effectively, like a device without service or without internet, could you just have a, you know, like you

can ask all of these questions and you might decide in this way or that, but ask the question because it's worthwhile to ask the question. And I say this as a kind of antecedent step of kind of clearing the space so that we can address a further question, which is how do I move from a kind of disposition of exhaustion to a disposition of abandon? Because in the struggle with sin, many of us find ourselves exhausted. It's like, I've tried this, I've tried that, it hadn't worked, and so I'm just gonna kind of limp along until such time as Jesus sees fit to call me home. Well, if we're always waging war against our nature,

then yeah, we're going to be exhausted. If we're using our will to counter our sensitive appetite, to counter our passions, our emotions, yeah, we're going to be exhausted. But if we learn ways by which to train our lower appetites on higher things and to kind of reorder those pursuits such that they actually synchronize rather than kind of abiding in perpetual conflict, then maybe we can abandon ourselves to a good which lies beyond the present horizon of our experience.

Because I think at the end of the day, we need to abandon ourselves to God if we are going to draw on the resources which help us to heal and to grow. And this is the inspiration behind a lot of 12-step programs which you probably come across in some way shape or form. But I know that like Father Sean Kilcahle for instance very much recommends a 12-step program as a way by which to overcome addiction to pornography and masturbation. To many of you that will sound drastic, but maybe it's time for something drastic, you know? And there are various ways in which these meetings are hosted with varying degrees of anonymity, so it's not the type of thing with, yeah, that you need necessarily react negatively to or be

repulsed by. So we want to move ourselves from a kind of disposition of exhaustion to a disposition of abandon, admitting that we can't and that God can and that that's a source of hope and encouragement rather than a further disappointment. Because what we're trying to do is get the good, right? We want to be in living communion with the good. So there's a hierarchy of goods out here in the world, you know, like we want to keep on existing and we want to procreate and educate our children, we want to know the truth about God, and we want to live peaceably in society.

And there's all these things that we want to do. But to live in communion with those goods only works well if they are occupying each the place that they are meant to occupy. Because if we prefer lower goods to higher goods, then it causes all kinds of problems, and we end up living a life of insubordination or lack of subject, whatever you want to call it. But like, we end up living a life of insubordination or lack of subject, whatever you want to call it, but like we end up just totally wonky. So for us it's a matter of kind of learning and coming to appreciate the higher goods, which end up being the more spiritual goods so that we can place or situate those lower

goods, those bodily goods as they ought to be situated. But we need bandwidth for this, you know, so we'll often mean setting aside certain lower goods so that we can have space for higher goods, giving ourselves exposure to higher goods so that, you know, while initially they might be exhausting or forbidding, we come to discover that they are delightful and encouraging in turn. So like, first time you try to pray for 20 minutes you might find that really

hard, but after you've done it a little bit you realize that it's wonderful, that it's beautiful, and that it engrosses you, that it draws you, that it attracts you, and it kind of runs itself rather than having to struggle constantly and wage war against your nature. Which brings us, yeah, to a kind of culminating point, well, at least at this first section, is that I think that when we focus on rooting out habitual sin will often succumb to this exhaustion, because left to your own devices you can root out a little bit but you're not going to be able to root out entirely.

It's just too tough, right? It's just too much. But you can crowd out. That is to say you can fill your life with the types of goods which leave little space for lower things in disorderly fashion which might upset that hierarchy of goods or might distract you from the good who is God. lower things in disorderly fashion which might upset that hierarchy of goods or might distract you from the good who is God. So yeah, think about your soul as a kind of flower bed and you want to plant annuals and

perennials and beautify it so that that soil is being drawn on by what ought ultimately grow, right? What ought ultimately to flourish rather than just laying fallow and then having it grown up with weeds or having weeds grow up in the midst Because we haven't taken the time to actually invest. Okay Next I'd say like the next thing to think about is just your ordinary converted life A lot of us go straight to the tips and tricks like I need to install this software I need to do like this cool practice or whatever it is

But I think that what we need to do is live a Christian life and And the five things that I always list are prayer, sacraments, friendship, penance, and study. Okay? And I think that you could profit from those five. I'm going to focus on first the sacrament of confession. A lot of us think of the sacrament of confession as a reset button. When truth be told, it is both a reset button, that is to say a source of forgiveness of sins, but also a source of grace because it gives us the grace of penitence, which is like the grace of the virtue of conversion

effectively. That virtue which turns us to our past so that we can see our sins more clearly, that we can hate them and that we can lament them, ultimately to motivate a deeper relationship with the Lord in the present. Okay? So the point isn't to live there and regret. The point is to turn to the Lord, acknowledge how is it like at work in your life so that he can kind of conduct you into the future in greater intimacy with more intensity. All right? So confession is not just a reset button. It is a

source of grace. Use it regularly. I recommend that people use it once a month. For people struggling with habitual sin, you might use it more frequently. Also, regular reception of Holy Communion. So Holy Communion causes, or it fans into flame, the grace of charity. So charity has to already be there, so reconstituted by the sacrament of penance if you have fallen in mortal sin, but then presuming charity is there, the sacrament of Holy Communion, it fans it into flame. It burns away venial sins and causes a more ardent love of God and neighbor. All right. So we don't want to be receiving Holy communion in an unworthy state because

that kind of deadens us to spiritual goods and makes it easy for us to live a life of kind of lackadaisical or lackluster practice. Um, but yeah, we want to safeguard that intimate and intense encounter, uh, and to approach the altar worthily and often. And then a life of prayer. Prayer has to be daily bread. It has to be regular. It has to be mental. It has to be somewhat focused. Now, you're going to be fatigued. You're going to be distracted. That's fine. But it's important that it be constant, that it be regular, because this is the source of an

encounter with the Most High God, with these spiritual goods I described, which can effectively crowd out the bodily goods which threaten to overwhelm us and to kind of undermine us, as it were. So, if you grow your life of prayer in such a way as to, yeah, be consumed thereby, you'll find that habitual sexual sin is just less vexing and that it's less troubling. So, I know very few people, for instance, who pray four rosaries a day and who also struggle with habitual sexual sin. Now, mind you, I don't always ask that question in the context of the sacrament of confession.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting point. Alright, so then the next thing that I want to just kind of highlight or mention is to live this process of conversion. There will be setbacks, there will be falls, and I would say in those instances try to bracket disappointments. The most important thing to be said about you isn't that you have fallen. The most important thing to be said about you is that God has trained His mercy on you in particular in a kind of peculiar way. So that that virtue of

penitence helps to distance us from sin especially as we return to the sacrament of confession and it's it's good to know that like you're contending with something that's difficult okay so you don't have to be Pollyanna ish when you go to the sacrament of confession you say I intend not to sin again and I mean that sincerely but if I'm not gonna sin again it's gonna be by God's help and it's gonna be by my consent and cooperation, but I know that my consent and cooperation at present is fragile, okay? So I want to be honest about that and entrust that too to the Lord, okay? So I think that we can look for help from the Most High God, and that we can look for progress in our

own experience, and we can take a kind of, yeah, like this register encouragement from the progress that we might see and a this register encouragement from the help that God gives, okay? So be patient with the physical and emotional and psychological changes which need to unfold as part of this process because an addiction, right, or an habitual sexual sin, it's in your body, it's in your sentiments, it's in your sentiments, it's in your thought world, and it just takes time to reorder that because some of those images are emblazoned in your mind and some of those practices are emblazoned in your habits and so we just need to retrain them and it just takes time to retrain them. It's not so simple to like re-blaze neural

pathways through your mind, okay? But what we can do is facilitate that change, right? Be somewhat gentle with our own humanity in facilitating that change. So you want to, for instance, get good sleep, right? You want to manage interpersonal conflict so that way you cultivate interior peace because if you have occasions where you typically fall in habitual sexual sin, when you're all stirred up about this or that, you got to know that about yourself and be on the lookout for it.

But also, you know, it doesn't always mean indulging ourselves or comforting ourselves. Sometimes it's going to mean chastising ourselves. I mentioned prayer, sacrament, penance, friendship, study of the faith. Well, apropos of penance, you've got to know that those most instinctual desires that the human person experiences are for food and drink and sexual intercourse because they concern the perpetuation of our individual life and our life as a species. And so these are things which are touched quite markedly by original sin, bent as it were and inflamed.

And so, yeah, it's just a big part of our life, it's a big part of our experience. But they're bound up together. All right? So the desire for sexual intercourse is bound up with the desire for food and drink. And that you can chase in the desire for sexual intercourse by chasing the desire for food and drink. So you can fast. I mean, like people are experimenting

with intermittent fasting, or they're kind of narrowing their eating window, or doing any number of things in a kind of secular setting. And you might be interested in that. You might take this as an opportunity to sacralize that, right? Or to try some kind of good practice, perhaps nothing super severe at the outset, and if severe you want to do that in coordination with a confessor or a spiritual director, but you know, chasing your appetites so that way you can benefit from the mortification

which creates space for spiritual goods and frees you up from a fixation or from an attachment which might otherwise drag you down. So get good sleep, fast, but when you do eat food, eat good food, don't eat junk food. So engage with real goods so that way you can live a real life. And also be cognizant of other addictive behaviors which might actually contribute to this, like addiction to technology, to screens, you know, to your computer or to your phone, create some space between computer and phone, leave it off for the beginning of the day, turn it off at the end of the day, etc. All of these things will help you. And then sacramentals, right?

Do not underestimate the power of sacramentals. Even just like laying hold of a crucifix in a time of temptation. A lot of people will say that with sexual temptation it's not good to engage because you're not going to engage profitably so you're going to want to flee. But when you flee you want to flee to something, to an activity which gets you out of your head and kind of into your body. So like laying hold of a crucifix and taking a walk or you know people have their different modes of approach but you want to get into the sacramental world into a kind of blessed bodily world rather than to an unblessed bodily world. You see the difference. One thing I'll highlight at this point is the angelic warfare confraternity.

So a confraternity associated with St. Thomas Aquinas, who when tempted during his one year house arrest at his family castle before entering the Dominicans. He prayed to be delivered from unchastity or from impurity. He had to kind of chase a prostitute out of his room that his brothers had introduced because they wanted him to kind of fall in chastity. They wanted him off his high horse so that he could be about the family business rather than doing this Dominican thing. Well, St. Thomas is said to have been kind of clothed in a sanctuary of chastity by two angels and then to have enjoyed a kind of cherubic chastity throughout the course of his life. And so there's a confraternity called the Angelic Warfare Confraternity associated with the patronage of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the members of that confraternity pray two prayers each day,

a prayer to the Lord and a prayer to St. Thomas Aquinas for chastity, for themselves and for the members of the confraternity, and then 15 Hail Marys in addition, and then they wear either a medal or a cord against their skin as continuously as they can, and they derive some spiritual benefit from that association, a kind of strength or encouragement in their pursuit of the virtue of chastity. So you can find out information about that, just search angelic warfare confraternity, just another kind of instance of a sacramental providing help in time of temptation. And then another thing is like people don't often think about this but yeah, like with sexual sin you're being tempted by a kind of base desire, a desire that we share with the beasts and when we plunge ourselves in it there's a kind of risk that we in turn

become bestial, however you pronounce that word. So there's a way in which we can kind of grow beyond it, grow beyond the turpitude of kind of crass or base sin by engaging in things beautiful. And that doesn't mean to become an esthete, but it means kind of like again raise your gaze to things that are excellent, to things that are noble, to things that are dignified so that you can live there. So this might be an occasion to cultivate an interest in sacred art or in good literature or even like the beauty of the lives of the saints, like a kind of moral beauty. And being attracted by beauty, we find it easier to distance ourselves from ugliness.

And then having said all these things, obviously there are other kind of tips and tricks, there are other helps that we can avail ourselves of, like accountability or filtering software, like programs like Exodus 90, which incorporate a lot of what I have described. But we always want to do so within the setting of our ongoing conversion, the story of salvation at work in our midst, seeing this as part that the Lord is going to use for our liberation ultimately from, yeah, not merely sin and vice, but even temptation and beyond, right? Because He wants us with Him in heaven. So to review, start with repentance, thinking beyond, reimagining the moral universe, try to move from exhaustion to abandon, right? Don't think just like, I've got to work against, no, I've got to give up, but I've got to give up in the presence of the Lord. And then trying to see the goods within their hierarchy to be like sufficiently free to pursue spiritual goods so that

I can kind of re-situate then those bodily goods. And then seeking to live an ordinary converted life with use of the sacrament of confession, regular reception of Holy Communion, and daily prayer so that then I can see this as part of the process of conversion, bracketing disappointments, giving space for physical and emotional and psychological retraining as I blaze new neural pathways and forge new habits and facilitate that change by attending to all the pertinent factors and then laying hold of those sacramental helps that God gives, talked about the crucifix, the angelic warfare confraternity and then raising our gaze to the beauty which will kind of pull us away from the ugliness which has come to characterize our experience.

So that's what I wanted to say. I hope that is of some help to you. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get other things when they come out. I also contribute to a podcast called, what is it called, God's Planning. We had a recently, gosh, I can't talk anymore. We had a recent episode on Chastity,

which you might profit from. We also have a retreat coming up August, nope, June 7th through 9th in Malvern, Pennsylvania for people 21 years and older. So you can find out information about that at godsplanning.org. I recommend it, hope to see you there. And then, yeah, I think those are the things.

Oh, there's also a men's retreat coming up, but I don't think that's announced yet, and it won't be announced for a little while. So, men's retreat coming up in Brevard, North Carolina the second weekend of August. Stay tuned. Alright, folks. Know of my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.