Seeking the Holy Spirit

Hey @CPilot, thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience with adoration. My favorite service of the year is Holy Thursday, and I have wonderful memories of a Holy Thursday service in grad school where we sung the "Tantum ergo sacramentum" with only candlelight and then proceeded to adoration. I haven't been to a Holy Thursday in a while (we decided not to go the past couple years because our kids were so little and loud) but I really miss it. I think I'll make a point of going next year, even if my wife and I need to leave the kids at home and "take turns"

As someone who struggles with lust, I find it so wonderful that Catholics have the doctrine of the Incarnation. Our religion is an embodied religion. In porn, the body is fetishized and disassociated from the person's soul (think about porn videos with exaggerated close-ups of body parts and where the person's face is not even shown). In the heresy of gnosticism, the body is viewed as evil and only the mind and spirit as good. In Catholicism, we recognize that the human person is a body-soul composite; we are neither pure spirit (unlike angels) nor pure matter (unlike non-human animals). God, who is pure spirit, took on our body-soul human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. We, in turn, are called to become "other Christs" -- to let ourselves become sanctified by grace, both body and soul. For me, I have found that my life has often swung between two extremes: either living on a purely mental/spiritual plane while neglecting the needs of my body (e.g., for sleep, rest, exercise, healthy eating, intimacy with my wife), or obsessing with dehumanized bodies in porn. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament -- God present in the body of the Host -- reminds me that the solution lies in having my two natures being reunited and reintegrated.

 

You are absolutely right. Thank you for reminding us of this awesome mystery. This also reminds me that I would probably benefit a lot from visiting my own church more often. We have been praying the Mass from home as a family due to Covid, but I had started to attend daily Mass at church once a week once I felt it was safe to do so. I work from home now so have more freedom in my schedule. But I haven't gone in a while now. I also haven't received the Eucharist in a while, because of my mortal sin (PM). I have been confessing it but I had been doing PM so regularly that once I started nofap, I figured I should first get some decent sobriety before going back to confession so the priest can see I am serious. So I think I will go soon. But either way, I can still adore Jesus in front of the tabernacle even if I am not in a state of grace. Stopping PM is starting to unveil some deep sadness that I must have been covering up with porn all along. So bringing that to Jesus in prayer will help I think.

 

Thank you, @CPilot. Deep down I think I know you are right. There have been times I have been to confession and my heart was not in the right place but for the most part, I have always been sorry for my PM sins and known they were wrong. I was "burned" once with a priest who was almost mad at me in confession because I had acted out too many times, and thought I wasn't taking it seriously, even though I was. So that past experience may be playing a role in my current feelings. But the two priests in my current parish are both very kind and I've never had this kind of attitude from them. Also there might be the pride of trying to work out my own salvation, which the devil might be using to keep me away from confession. I think secular means to fight addiction like nofap are extremely important and sometimes undervalued in the church, for me a purely spiritualized approach (i.e. just pray more) has never gotten me as far as nofap now, even though I don't have that many days yet. But for Catholics like us the two must be combined. And in the end the only thing that matters is our relationship to God. So if my recovery doesn't bring me closer to God then it is not a true recovery.

Here's one more thought I had though, I wonder what you think of it. It sounds really weird, but here it is anyway. I feel like the devil is "giving me a break" right now temptation-wise because I am not in a state of grace anyway. He knows I will go to him if I die. (I haven't had as many strong urges as I would have expected after quitting PM so abruptly, i.e., withdrawal symptoms.) With fewer temptations it will be easier to get some sobriety "base". I worry that as soon as I am in a state of grace again, the devil will return with full-frontal assaults that I do not yet have the strength to withstand. But of course, that is also playing with my eternal fate, given the absence of state of grace.

 

Wikihow has a great article called "How to receive the Holy Spirit." I have studied that and it is helpful in quitting.

 

This is a great thread; lots of wisdom here.

 

Yes, what a deeply unsettling and mysterious passage, like much of the Gospels. Upon reading it, one feels like there is no hope. But then, we know Jesus expelled many demons. There is also another passage where some of His disciples try to expel a demon and can't, but Jesus says that certain kinds of demons can only be expelled through prayer. Or they couldn't cast it out because of their little faith. Clearly only God's grace can save us in the end.

The other way I read this passage (obviously not a canonical interpretation!) in my own life is that when the demon of PM addiction starts going out of me, it reveals "seven other spirits" -- things like fear, resentment, anger, worry that I had been using PM to cover up. And my condition feels worse than it was before. But it is a necessary step towards true healing; I need to face these other issues with all the secular and spiritual tools at my disposal.

That is a huge encouragement for me, thank you for sharing it. It sounds like it is still a weakness but not of the compulsive type, which sounds much more manageable. And how wonderful that God makes us dependent on Him through prayer and the sacraments to remain outside the addiction. "Apart from Me you can do nothing."

Yes, I agree with that. Otherwise, that is essentially pelagianism (believing we can save ourselves through sheer moral excellence). I need God's grace to have the strength to practice those tactics in the first place. Or, I can white-knuckle it for a while, but without God I will eventually peter out. The other way is see it is this: in porn, I am really searching for God, but in the wrong place. I need to reorient my search for God where I can actually find Him (prayer, sacraments, loving others). Christians are not stoics who resist moral evil for the purpose of achieving moral heroism; Christians resist moral evil because it is an obstacle on their way towards God, because it prevents them from reaching true happiness which is being lost in the ocean of Love that is God Himself.

Let me conclude with a quote I love from Bishop Barron:

When the divine power is the uncompromised center of our lives---as it is for the saints---then the myriad energies of our souls---intellectual, moral, physical, emotional, sexual---tend to fall into harmony around it.

When Christ is the "ground" of the soul, the soul finds peace, order and beauty. Make God's will the center of your concerns, and your proximate needs, desires and longings will tend to find their place.

 

In Matthew 12 the spirit comes back and finds the home "Empty." As we start doing something for Jesus the Holy Spirit "fills" up the home. But it becomes a huge challenge if we only do a "little" bit for Jesus. Because the spirit comes back and now can fight and tempt us. But we can fight back and win. I love the prayer, "Father, take away this spirit of lust and help me to care about souls." With this prayer, we are fighting for our house and we are trying to get the house filled so that negative spirits start to lose interest in visiting anymore.

 

I really like that!

 

I looked up the Litany of Humility -- boy, that is a hard prayer indeed! But the last line really struck me:

That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should.

It almost seems to put the whole thing in context. The goal is not to try to outdo each other in heroic acts of virtue so as to win the moral competition (although parts of St. Paul sound like that sometimes). The goal is to become exactly the specific saint God wants ME to be. And that will look different for different people. Or, to put it differently, to try to better myself each day as opposed to trying to be better than others.

 

Yes, and the one who honestly tries to become a saint - day after day, the one will be set free from pmo and other addictions as a side effect. The aim to become a saint and on the way some side effects. There is no better and no more efficient side effect therapy. Our focuse should be on becoming a saint and ... all other necessary will be added to us. All efforts to become a saint are all in all a therapy - the growing of a new man. The new man doesn't use pmo. To focuse on getting rid of pmo is a mistake. It would be only to focuse on oneself. A good path to become a saint ( pmo free as one of many results) is to focuse on God. How to focuse on God without enough and frequent prayer?
The pope John Paul II said that to become a saint is an obligation. And I thought for many years that it's something optional. This prolonged my state of slavery.

 

That is very true. I think becoming a saint in an obligation in the sense that it is the only way to become truly happy, which is what all human beings want. We are wired for God, and only God can satisfy our deepest longings. The saint is the one who loves God above all things, and all other things for the sake of God. In this he/she finds his/her true happiness.
For me too, I thought for a long time that the pursuit of holiness is reserved for certain people, for examples priests and nuns. But pursuit of holiness just means pursuit of true happiness. Because we are made for God, only in the relentless pursuit of God can we ever hope to find this happiness. The more we make room for the Holy Spirit to dwell inside us, by prayer, the sacraments, and our concrete acts of self-discipline and love for others, the less we will find a need for compulsive acts like PMO.

 

Very true. I'm sure that you remember the line, "Our hearts were made for you Oh Lord and they shall not rest until they rest in You."

 

Exactly, it's because God is healing, the presence of God heals us. If we are not conscious of the presence of God we are cut off healing source. It must be understood literally. If anybody doubts then let them go to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament - at least 30 minutes. Then they'll know that this healing is real.

 

@CPilot I noticed you just passed the 1-year mark -- congratulations!!!