Praise Over Lust
Lust is rampant in the world, in people, in people who go to churches and just about everywhere else.
People struggle and give up, and there are those who struggle and eventually give in out of despair: these are people you and I see all the time. The most alarming is those who don't even think lust is a problem. Lust, to them, is nothing more than the outward expression of their biological makeup, 'I was made like this, it's in the genes, innit'. They could genuinely believe this; after all, modernist society wants everyone to think they're hedonistic apes with iPods and condoms. It may not even be this conscious acceptance of modernist doctrine on sex. They may just simply give in to how wider modern society and culture approaches and thinks about lust. They keep it simple and just give in without thinking. We chew our steak and say: "Ignorance is bliss".
But perhaps the same people have just given up after so much disappointment, trying to fight against lust, disappointed about never moving into a true, transformative relationship with God. And the disappointment changes in form and function; it becomes contentment and gratification.
You may have already known all that. And if you were to ask someone to attend a talk or a bible study about lust, it's almost certain that that person will think, Another talk by a morally superior person, or at least thinks they are, about an issue they truly have no comprehension of. Lust and sex, and their misunderstood cousin marriage, end up over spiritualised or just grossly mishandled. People walk out with head bruises from being beaten with a laundry list of Scripture verses. In the middle of an empassioned moment, a couple try to recall formulaic solutions shoved down their throats. It's not strong enough. It's not strong enough to counteract, calm, soothe the unbridled lust filling their eyes as the barrier of clothes slowly disappears.
Something becomes clear incredibly quickly. How can you or our churches be so mechanical about a problem wholly organic in growth, although parasitic by nature? It must be that if lust is organic, the solution must be organic. And if the very essence of lust is in fact parasitic, the solution has to be as powerful and as penetrating as an all-consuming and merciless parasite. The solution must take us from where we are, a fallen yet sanctified kind, and guide us, transform us, regenerate us into and towards a wholly new 'organism', into the true image of Christ.
You look at someone and you can't just move your eyes off their body. You look and desire that flesh because that flesh is so appealing. Something within just needs to be fed. Someone else gives you attention or unspoken commitment of time or affection, and that overwhelming need to be understood, acknowledged, loved surges. Many people opt to turn off this need and medicate it instead. So, one of these desires or any other desire, left uncaged, inflames any of one us until we become carriers of a fire God did not intend for us to carry. And as a raging fire, it burns until it consumes. The wrong lord is appeased by the smoke rising. And the beautiful altar which the Lord God has lovingly built lies in ruins.
Praise can conquer lust. Praise draws us back into that community which God is: a community based on freely moving love and praise. Praise fixes our eyes and reforms them because we look and we just want to honor. It's hard to praise with these eyes simply because we end up being lost in the texts in endless Theotokias, glorification hymns, Kiahk praises. The text doesn't really hold any intrinsic, mystical secret that will transform our eyes. It is rather the purpose of all those hymns laid down for us.
This occurred to me one night during Midnight Praises. I was on my own in church. I looked at the icon of the Theotokos. The words were familiar and banal in my mouth. I tried to console myself with more careful and meticulous handling of the music. It affected no change on me. But looking at the face of the Theotokos brought something in itself. I somehow, through some undeserved and uneventful grace, linked the banal words of the text to the image of the icon.
I wondered if this was the secret of praise, that I look unto the face of this holy woman. Why is it I didn't look at her with the same eyes that devoured the girl at the coffee shop? Or the newcomer to church dressed for a hot summer?
It could be that this is an image. And it could be that in our attempt to venerate the Theotokos, we forget she was a woman who had breasts and most probably a beautiful smile (if Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth is anything to go by). Some Jewish man must have desired the Virgin at some point. Why don't we? We seemed to kept in place by piety and our unease with picturing citizens of the Church as people with drives like us.
My eyes seem transfixed on her serene icon and my thoughts take me back to falling. I forget the words and bumble along. My mind seems overwhelmed by another thought. Could the solution to lust be praise?
The Desert Fathers link sexual lust with all desires of the flesh: food, emotions, and the needs of the soul. Sexual lust does not need to be acted upon into a physical act in order to start that brushfire. The lust can build and billow within for a lifetime with no physical sin committed. And that, something that people simply don't want to admit, is the real horror of the nature of lust. It doesn't need a host body or a manifestation in order to destroy; simply by its very nascent presence in a person, that is enough danger.
And those who fight against lust... oh, they give themselves to prayer, race to the altar for communion, stand at the feet of Christ pleading, doing all this and indeed, the healing is slowly affected to them. But lust started because of something more fundamental. Lust started when we looked at something in the wrong way, not with the eyes of Christ. When we lust, we look with the eyes of the flesh and weakness. We desire something in that person for ourselves, something we can feed off later and hope to feed off. We finish, lick our fingers, and then run back for more. Where can I get more! I am starving, feed me.
When we praise someone, we honor and marvel in what we see. We don't dare take or steal because it's too precious and beautiful. More importantly, when we praise, we are showing our respect and reverence to that person. We're saying,"I don't want anything from you. I don't wish to take anything from you. I just want to stand here and never leave. Because seriously, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever looked at it." Maybe... maybe the Church wants us to have the eyes of Christ! The Church wants us to develop those eyes of the Beloved, who looked at His mother at the most harrowing moments of the Cross. He didn't forget her, he entrusted her into the hands of John, the one who faithfully followed the Lord through all. And so the Church entrusts the Theotokos in our care, so that we may care, venerate and wouldn't forget her, not even in the most harrowing moments of total suffering on the Cross. He could have been like us and while in his last moments, thought with his flesh and looked at any woman to eat. But he didn't. He sought out his mother with his wearied eyes and honored her.
And so we go back and once we've fed off everything, we look at that person and we find them unattractive. Nothing desirable is left. Like a dry, ravaged field, you abandon it and move on.
I wish sometimes that we had no free will and that God was neurotic, overprotective, preempting any slip of ours by shielding us. But with no free will, there is no crown and with no crown, there is no path to Golgotha to receive the crown. Thus, we have free will and thus we face lust, amongst so many sins and temptations, every day, choosing whether to give into the fire of the wrong lord or to race towards God.
Then there's the death look or in cruder terms, the bitch look. The death look is a uniquely a feminine thing. When a girl gives another one the death look, it's reverse lust or a curious form of it. It's not to consume out of greed or hunger. It's lust of destruction. "How can you have that? How could you do that? Give me a piece of you I can destroy in my mind.. NOW!" And no different to men, women take that piece away and feed on it in jealousy until they come back for seconds.
Looking at a girl, a sister, and seeing her as a beautiful altar the Lord built for a purpose is done with the eyes of Christ. We all have the Spirit inside of us which draws us to God, the pool of Siloam, to get those eyes. Sometimes, we don't want to go to him. Why bother? It's nice just standing back and soaking it all in. The worst kind of pornography is the one that breeds quite happily within, not needing any further external stimuli. Scary. Sometimes, we even say we are not, but we can't accept that we are sexual beings, attracted by beautiful people, our eyes drawn to beauty. To deny that beauty exists is to deny God's character! Bishop Nonnus, he whom looked at Pelagia and marveled at God for his workmanship without lusting, teaches us it's very possible and actually a Christian reality. A reality not to be given only after threshold of prayers and works is passed.
It seems that God wants men to develop eyes of brotherhood and women eyes of sisterhood. Men are to look at women and not devour. Women are to look at men and not devour. Women are to look at women and not destroy. A man looks at the woman and just wants to marvel in her beauty, virtue, and purity not desiring to have any for himself. A woman looks at another woman, her prettier friend or the Theotokos herself, and she looks in adoration at an older sister, a role model she can be like. And then both man and woman, being given the same eyes, they turn to eachother in marriage and look in the same way they looked at the Theotokos.
The one problem brought up here is man and woman in marriage will be physically attracted to eachother and at one point, united in the flesh when they first commune of eachother, naked. They will want eachother. They will want to be consumed by eachother. Is that lust? Is that eating of eachother in their thoughts and eyes? What has been mentioned before still applies. Does he look at her and throw her aside once the moment has past? Does she disengage from his touch once the thought has been satiated in her mind? The guidelines in marriage are mutually selfless love and two lovers transfixed on eachother with the eyes of God.
The comforting message of the Gospel that Christ gives us the eyes of praise freely. The Church has prepared a way to keep those eyes healthy, alive, and crystal clear. Your eyes have never seen such awesome beauty.. beauty you don't even covet, but rather beauty you simply want to praise. The Gospel shows us another way, a higher way, a way where Christ treated every person he dealt with with care and total respect. Before he opened his mouth or raised his hand, Christ looked with his eyes and saw the full potential glory in every person. We look and see our fantasy fulfilled; he looked and saw his destiny on earth fulfilled for that particular person.
I think about this further and it becomes clear; I want his eyes and only his.
