DENIAL OR INDULGENCE?

Fr Jim Cogley

We live in a very sexualized culture where the repression of earlier generations is being given expression in the present. In the not-so-distant past sex was the only sin and the behaviour young people take for granted today their ancestors believed would have caused them to roast in hell. Many still struggle with sexual feelings and find it a stressful way to live where they are controlled by thoughts and desires and don’t feel free. To deny life and its impulses is never the way to find joy and peace because what we deny will always seek expression and the very act of denial only serves to feed the flames of desire. At the same time indulgence is not an alternative since it just leads to enslavement. To give free reign to one’s impulses is to be controlled by them. There must be a middle way, the acceptance of all that we are, and working with reality rather in opposition to it. Somewhere within that space it is possible to find peace.

The story of the Prodigal Son is a good example of someone who had a big appetite for life and went the way of indulgence. Having exercised his freedom and denying himself nothing he lost his senses and ended up with an inner life that was completely depleted. It took rock bottom for him to regain his sense and come home to himself. Similarly, a man found himself living in a garden shed because his wife had discovered he had been watching porn late into the night. He failed to see that it was a betrayal of their relationship, but she knew that it was, and how unavailable he had become. When asked to describe what his addiction was like he said that the deeper he went into it the more his mind had become a cess pool as it chased one alluring image after another, and he had become less and less present to himself and to his wife and family. It had literally robbed him of his senses.

During my years teaching in Secondary School, I asked a group of leaving Cert students what was their idea of freedom? On seventeen-year-old said that freedom is ‘to be able to do whatever you want to do, with whoever you want to do it with, and as often as you want to do it’. This opinion generated quite a lot of discussion with the rest of the group. Most of them would have initially agreed but gradually began to see that the concept was fundamentally flawed, to the extent that it could only lead to the very worst forms of enslavement. What value does that kind of freedom have if you don’t have any control over the consequences. To be free to break the law is to incur the punishment of the law. To be free to break any commandment is to break oneself on it. Gradually the realization dawned that freedom is not the ability to do whatever one wants but to do what one ought to do.

One of the worst forms of enslavement is to be in the grip of an addiction. This is where I want more and more of what I don’t really need and yet am convinced that I can’t live without it. In a state of addiction, I always live one step removed from myself and it is my inner void that cries out to be filled. Just as nature abhors a vacuum so does the inner world of soul crave connection and completion. This is also the world of lies where I even begin to believe my own. My ego will try to convince me, and also others, that things are not as bad as they really are and contrary to all evidence I am still in control of my life. So, for brief periods I can reinforce the illusion and give up my substance abuse for brief periods while after each relapse I sink deeper. It is really only at the point where my ego

resources have finally run out and been declared bankrupt that I will be ready to admit my powerlessness and acknowledge that only a higher power can restore me to sanity.