Last Sunday, the Gospel reading was from Matthew 6.  As I listened to the priest read the passage, this part stuck out to me:

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

This is precisely why I am having so much trouble in my Christian life. There is a lingering light in me that is darkness. It is a darkness which was cultivated over several decades, beginning when I was quite young. I wrote about this darkness and how it developed in me in another blog piece:

The Man Who Helped Destroy America – Reflecting on the Life of Hugh Hefner.

Men (and sometimes women, as I have come to understand) who play around with pornography are playing with fire. Our culture snickers and acts as if it is “no big thing” to look at naked people indulging themselves in copulation. Oh, but it is, and quite a big thing.  Psychiatrists now admit that porno rewires your mind. It seems to create thought grooves in the mind and the images implant themselves in your head and – this is the worst part – will not go away. I can remember things I looked at over forty years ago as a young man, and quite vividly.  For me, as one who now is attempting to follow Christ in chaste living and decency, this is a nightmare! My mind was, over the decades of watching this filth, filled with darkness, so that even now, despite my repeated visits to the Sacrament of Confession and my prayers against these thoughts, my “eye” is dark and evil. In short, what this sin has developed in me is what I refer to in my confessions to the Lord as a “fornicator’s heart.” Even though I do not wish to indulge in sin anymore, my mind – the “eye” of my being – has been permanently warped, and while I have the power now to not look at pornography for over 20 years, the fact is that the thoughts and how they affect my life are still with me. It will take death, and the purgation of soul which occurs after death, to make my soul truly clean.

Viewing porno creates a thought pattern in the mind, a behavioral approach to the world and to women which is detrimental to chaste thinking. When I am out in public and see an attractive young woman, my eyes almost automatically go to two places on her body. Sometimes I am able to look away before my eyes go there. I am working on training myself to not look, but it is really hard. The Jesus Prayer * helps a lot.  Often, when I catch sight of an attractive young lady out of the corner of my eye and see that she is showing flesh, I throw that prayer into gear and am able to ignore her by God’s grace.

Pornography turns women into nothing more than walking genitalia. And going to a public swimming pool or beach is out for me.  I avoid them like the plague. Yet during the summer, some women seem determined to walk about as near to naked as they can possibly get. We live in a world now in which shame is considered silly and foolish. When I was a young boy, women were nowhere near as coarse and vulgar as they are today.  And in our “Me First and the Hell with You” society which has made a god out of personal freedom to do almost anything you like, anywhere, anytime, and too bad if you don’t like it, shame is unknown.

I am ashamed beyond words to admit to all this, but since I am airing out my dirty laundry, no sock shall be left unhung. I am sure that other men have the same problem because pornography is a huge problem in the world and even among Christian men.

This is why pornography is so bad and if we ever had a truly Christian nation, the first Playboy magazine that was published would have been publicly burned and Hugh Hefner warned that if he tried it again, he would spend the rest of his life in prison. Sin destroys lives – some lives immediately and some over the course of the rest of the life.

Our Lord’s warnings in the Bible, and the moral rules of the Church from His teaching, do not exist without purpose. God wants the best for us, both in this life and in the ages of ages to come. My life should be a warning to all who think that sin is just a trifle, nothing to get upset about. No, sin ruins our lives, causes unhappiness, and ultimately will lead the unrepentant to experience God’s love as torment after death. This is my unhappiness, that I have to look back on my life and know that my behavior in this area hurt people and caused me to not understand what true, self-giving, self-sacrificial love really is.  A person who is self-consumed, which is a description of all porn addicts, cannot really know how to give himself in love.

My first wife, before she died, complained to me one day “All you want is sex.” She was right, but the light that was in me was darkness and I could not see the truth she was telling me. She wanted to feel cared for. What she was smart enough to understand was that my relationship with her was strictly utilitarian for the purpose of pleasure. This is not to say that I didn’t try to love her, but that my ability to have a deep and intimate relationship with her was badly crippled by the darkness that I had developed over the years.

I could blame a lot of people – Playboy magazine, my parents, who gave me neither warning against sexual immorality nor lived a Christian life before me, my peers who introduced me to porn – but ultimately, I am to blame for listening to the siren call of wickedness and, finding hedonism to my liking, plunging in. I thank God I have been delivered from this scourge, but having to still deal with the aftereffects of my decisions, I wish I had listened a whole lot earlier in my life. Life is a series of lessons.

This one has been by far the most painful to me.

* The Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”