Today, internet pornography poses more problems for many people, both young and old, because this access to this dehumanizing digital vice is just an easy click away. They are often introduced to it out of curiosity and idleness and are gradually and helplessly hooked to it.
Investing time to viciously engage pornography, unlike studying for math, literature and school projects, can never receive a grade or reward. As it would be unimaginable for schools on one fictitious day, to start awarding students gold medals for getting F’s, it would also be unthinkable for society to one day start praising people for hosting or watching indecent shows. No justification whatsoever –even the lame excuse that everyone does it any way– will be capable of upgrading pornography from something objectively degrading –physically and spiritually–into something laudable and uplifting of the person.
What can be done? One must “learn” to flunk this vice rather than excel in it! First, it is important to understand some of the harsh effects of something that can be compared to a virus like AIDs that stealthily attacks a person’s health.
Lustful acts and desires are like an invisible poison. They debase our dignity and also others –created in God’s image and likeness– by stimulating our base instincts and thus reducing us to beasts. Without a proper antidote, this deadly venom will slowly corrode the other noble realities of a person’s life: the family, friendship and professional work.
Second, it muddles up one’s interior composure and focus, distorts the feelings, passions, and imagination. These are all rolled into one confusing repulsive mass of accelerated emotions. Together these heighten personal insecurity and loss of self-esteem in social engagements. And they also leave the ulcers of regret and remorse for having wasted precious hours on something that artificially and superficially pleasured one’s senses, but dumps the person guilt-ridden, disoriented and slothful.
This toxic vice of lust short-circuits our spiritual integrity and energy. Ever tried short-circuiting a battery? It seems fun because it produces sparks, but it drains and damages the battery in the process. A similar thing occurs when one sins gravely especially in lust. By choosing to love ourselves first over God through inordinate pleasure, a person short-circuits the virtue of charity in the soul. Thus, he is deactivated from performing any supernatural good acts which only charity can operate in him. His supernatural activation can only take place through a sincere and perfect act of sorrow and most especially through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
It is moving when many return to our Lord with a sincere and loving sorrow to struggle anew to live holy purity. In the spiritual battle the humble and repentant decision to immediately return to God is essential, but it is also important to realize that one cannot be obsessed with only avoiding this particular sin for the sake of avoiding it. There is more to the spiritual life than just avoiding bad things. Thus, one cannot allow a single negative skirmish to make him forget there are still a lot more good things to do in a day.
A person, however, who stubbornly clings to lust, who isn’t sorry for his vices makes it more difficult for himself to enter Heaven. This is not because God will impede him, but because the person himself chooses to incapacitate himself by placing obstacles along the way in the form of the auxiliary vices of lust: intemperance, lack of sobriety, material attachments, etc. These weaken the soul’s natural capacity for celestial realities: prayer, penance, going to Mass or saying some pious devotions and even serving others become irrelevant and burdensome. Blinded, the person is speedily led down the slippery highway of perdition.
If in academic terms flunking a subject means we have not studied for it, then we could apply this analogy in order to flunk the lustful lure and snare of pornography. By not studying we mean avoiding this ‘subject matter’ with all possible available human and supernatural means. Let’s not enlist for the subject of lust through useless curiosities which may start with an innocent news item or a pop-up which eventually leads us to a sea of malicious icons, pictures and videos. One of these will be the trigger that will drown us into the turbulent whirlpool of the lust activated.
One can also avoid signing up for this subject by making an effort of not dwelling on one’s past F’s. How many times has the imagination been the culprit to falls in morally compromising situations because one has not controlled it adequately? This interior power is best kept at bay indirectly, by channeling it towards spiritual ideals nourished in prayer, noble professional and social ambitions through good use of time and serving our neighbors. If the imagination is mortified, the sea of our passions is serene and easy to navigate through.
These potencies are best dominated when one also has custody of the eyes –the windows of our soul– for our hearts cannot desire that which the eyes do not see. St. Josemaría says, “You say you need a change!… opening your eyes wide so as to take in better the images of things, or almost closing them because you are short-sighted. Close them altogether! Have interior life, and you will see, in undreamt-of color and relief, the wonders of a better world, of a new world: and you will draw close to God. (The Way, no. 283)”