Spike is Best

Sometimes I think the greatest stretch of belief for people today has to do with the most basic realization and acceptance that the problems, the darkness, the confusions in their lives, stem from very specific decisions they made and very specific things they more or less immersed themselves in, either in the not-too-distant past, or way back once upon a time. Things that appear to them as little things. They cannot even make the connection when these decisions are occurring in the present.

To realize that:

--no, it is not that you have problems/struggles with lust which causes or weakens you to look at pornography, but that you have problems with lust precisely because you are looking at pornography/reading pornographic material - or more specifically, because you made a decision at one point to look at pornography/read pornographic material. You became its sowing bed, its slave; there is no "struggle" in fact; and the materialization of your decision in conjunction with that material is so actual and so real that even after you stop looking at those images, they will continue for some while to emerge in your mind and influence your very body;

--that the things you do, say, think, look at, read, hear, go toward incarnating in this world, beginning with the world of your own heart, either light or darkness, good or evil, which gives birth to fruit according to its own kind, and this becomes concrete, evidential, actual in your own life and the lives of others;

--and that no one is exempt from this inevitable transpiration in which the decision of the will becomes actual fruition;

For many people today, to see that this basic transpiration in their personal lives is for real - like realizing how venial sin can lead to mortal sin, and the way mortal sin produces spiritual death, which leads to a plethora of rotten fruits - strikes them like they just saw a wooly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger jump out of the woods. Like they saw something living and breathing and all-too-real from an age they never experienced; and in a sense they didn't experience it, for they were blind at the time.

Some of it comes, to my thinking, from a sort of gluttonous appetite for enjoying one's own problems - I almost want to say one's own cliches; a sort of anti-confession that serves to aggregate the filth around one as a sort of concentration of loose coal into impervious diamond. Which stems from atomization of the individual - or simply put, individualism.

This is one of the reasons why I'm wary of the seemingly intellectually vigorous discussion about 50 Shades of Grey like it was some kind of amazing phenomenon come down to us from the remotest regions of the cosmic world. Suddenly it's an incarnation of a culture sick for the alpha male, and it's like Walter White, and blah, blah, blah - and no, it has to do with Islam which means "submit" and blah, blah, blah - and no, it has to do with generations that were never disciplined as children and now they're seeking it out in sick and twisted ways and blah, blah, blah.

Yes, are you enjoying it?

It somehow also reminds me of an article written by a priest that I read a while back. He described how a husband was talking to him about his temper. Referring to his bad temper, the husband said, "I guess it's just the cross that I have to bear."

To which the priest said, "Well, no, actually. It's a cross your wife has to bear."

Enjoying it?

All of this - do not doubt for a second - is costing somebody something, somewhere, at some time, in some way.

And the cost ain't enjoyable.