Death or Liberty
Author: Andrew Comiskey
July 20, 2014
‘You took your sons and daughters whom you bore to Me and sacrificed them as food to the idols…you slaughtered and sacrificed My children.’ (Ez. 16: 20, 21)
Unthinkable. A father leaves his 22-month-old son in a hot car to die while he exchanges nude selfies with six women. Monstrous.
Think again. The monster lives in us, tempting us to abandon our own dignity and the lives of those we love most. The end of sexual addiction—in truth of all illicit sexual acts—is death. Few among us have not experienced the lure of sexy images or love objects whose presence promises a rush of pleasure so intense that we might just forsake all others for its demands.
Two things become clear in the tragedy that came to light in a Georgia courtroom last week: first, addiction enslaves desire. It takes our good and normal longing for love and twists/perverts/intensifies those desires by attaching them to false objects. Neither the real woman who conceived that child, nor the child left to die, was on the father’s mind as he trembled with anticipation for the next disembodied image on his I-phone.
He had entered the dreamy, demonic world of phantoms—unrealities far removed from bills and diapers and human need. Vengeful deities promised him relief at the cost of real life. These demons demand blood.
Besides enslaving our desires, addiction blinds us to impact of our compulsions. Addicts cannot recover while they live in the lie that their enslavement impacts no-one but themselves. Thus the wake up call to self-consumed addicts is a loved one who stumbles upon the affair or the thousands of websites on the home computer.
Whole-enough spouses and friends sound the alarm: ‘What kills you kills me too. I will no longer participate with our slow death. Get help. Not getting help means you are making the choice to seriously limit, if not end, our relationship.’
Heather King says it best: ‘We try to be pure because someone else needs us to be pure. Someone in pain needs us to refrain from using another, whether in reality or fantasy, to anesthetize our own pain. Maybe that person is standing in front of us in the grocery line with three screaming kids. Maybe that person is our spouse.’
Sound the alarm. Wake up to the nightmarish impact of your dreamy gods and goddesses. They enslave you and demand the blood of persons you love most. Remember the real faces of the one you married, the ones you sired or conceived, the faces of the kids your lover has abandoned to dance with you. Our God is just and will punish persons who stumble ‘little ones.’ See their faces and repent while you still can.
I marvel at the darkness that hovers over Christian families today in which the mother or father facing same-sex attraction is given a ‘pass’ to explore his/her gay destiny because the poor one cannot help it. So a parent abandons his/her family for a gay ‘spring break.’ In the name of compassion, we are sacrificing our children to the idol gods. Justice has stumbled in the streets.
Wake up. You have a choice. Get help. You cannot overcome this alone. It takes a village. Find a group desperate for God and for a daily commitment to loving real people. Like any drug addict, be prepared to go through withdrawals. Cry out for mercy constantly. God always hears that prayer and at some point that mercy will invade your heart. Worship Jesus. Turn off ‘Blues in the Night’ and sing ‘Amazing Grace’. You are both a wretch and a beloved child of God. Your destiny is love.
‘If I choose to act in such a way that separates me from my infinite destiny, I move closer to the abyss of not being free, that is, of not being able to love any more. I can be rescued only when the attraction of infinity wins over whatever is attracting me away from it. That is the redemption of my freedom.’
Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, as quoted by Christopher West in The Heart of the Gospel
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