Authentic Love

April 8, 2025

Catholic Daily Reflections

St Josemaria Institute

Hello!  How is each and every one?  I just arrived from my retreat in Tagaytay.  Please bear with me as I am just working on this post today.  I hope to be able to publish it within the week.  Thank you for your prayers.  I am certain I made a better retreat than the last one which was a good year and a half ago. I still need to work on a plan to put into effect whatever needs to be attended to every day throughout the year ahead, such as concretizing my resolutions that are doable every day, a resolution for a span of a week or two each time throughout the coming year until my next retreat; list of mortifications, plan for spiritual reading, a plan for topics to bring to my two periods of daily mental prayer, etc. Hence, I will continue needing your prayers.  I am confident that mentioning my need in this post is enough for God’s grace to flow continuously.  Be assured the graces will flow back to each one of you.

Following is the continuation of our divine longing for communion (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 10).

Love Versus Use

So why are we so down on lust?  Perhaps St. John Paul the Great said it best when he noted that the opposite of love is not hate but use. When we love someone, we work to help them become more of the person they already are, but when we use someone, we thingify them; we reduce them to a tool we can use.  Authentic love, expressed through what I like to call “holy sex” (Popcak, 2007), is not only pleasurable but also affirming of our humanity.  It helps us overcome shame and embrace healthy vulnerability, brings new life into the world, unites two people into one, and is a source of health and well-being.  By contrast, lust, because it treats the self and the other as objects, undermines our humanity, causes shame and a fear of vulnerability, fears and even despises new life, alienates people first from themselves and then from others, and is the source of disease and death.  The sin of lust has everything to do with treating a person as an object, but we were simply not designed for this.

When something is treated in a manner for which it was not designed, it breaks down.  For instance, a toaster makes a terrible hammer and tends not to make much toast after you’ve tried to pound a nail into the wall with it.  In a similar way, humans, who were designed for love, break down and have a harder time giving and receiving true love and experiencing communion when they have been used by others or have used themselves through lust. A California State University study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that people who engage in casual sex report a lower sense of well-being and higher rates of anxiety and depression than those who do not (Bersamin, Zamboanga, Schwartz, et al., 2014).  Likewise, researchers at the University of Virginia found that couples who had multiple sexual partners before marriage reported significantly less marital satisfaction than those who had fewer partners or were virgins at the time of their wedding (Rhoades and Stanley, 2014).

St.  Thomas Aquinas observed that death is the unnatural separation of body and soul.  Lust is a deadly sin because, like death, it unnaturally separates the body from the soul in our relationships with others.  Where the divine longing for communion prompts us to give as much of ourselves as is appropriate to a particular relationship so that we may be truly known by the other person, lust wants us to be stingy, giving only enough of ourselves that we can create the illusion of knowing and being known by another.  Unfortunately, illusions never satisfy.

Counselors who treat the problem sexual behaviors caused by lust know that people who struggle with lust often feel frustrated in their attempts to create deep, intimate connection with other people.  The more serious a person’s struggle with lust, the more they tend to struggle with effectively communicating their needs and emotions, being competent at negotiation and problem-solving, and making themselves vulnerable, in healthy ways, to others.  Only by addressing these underlying problems—problems that, not coincidentally, directly impact the person’s ability to meet their divine longing for communion with others—can individuals struggling with lust experience relief from their compulsions.

Tom has been married for ten years.  He is a good husband to Maryann and a loving father to their three children.  He is active in his parish and likes to help the pastor with various projects as he can.  That is why Maryann was so devastated when she caught Tom masturbating in front of his laptop one night.  She had gone to bed early but came down for a drink.  She thought she would check in on Tom, who said he had some work to catch up on.  That’s when she found him in front of the computer.

Enraged, she made him show her his browsing history and the other sites he had visited.  After arguing late into the night, Tom confessed that, like many men, he had been using pornography since he was a teenager.  Although he always thought his desire for porn would stop once he was married, he found the urge actually got stronger.  It had gotten to the point where he was masturbating more days than not.  He didn’t know why.  He was ashamed.  Tom told Maryann that he often confessed his struggle, and after confession he could abstain for several days, but the urge always came back with a vengeance.  He tried to reassure Maryann that he didn’t want to do it and that it wasn’t her fault, but she was devastated.

At Maryann’s insistence, Tom sought counseling.  Tom says, “When I went for my first appointment, I spent most of the time talking about my long-term struggle with porn and all the things I’d tried to do to stop.  About half an hour into my monologue, the therapist asked me whether I was able to be honest with Maryann about my feelings and needs.  At first I thought he meant sexually, but he clarified that, yes, he meant that too, but primarily he was asking about my ability to communicate my feelings and needs in general.

“The question confused me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really did tend to clam up about things. I mean, I’ll talk about what happened in the day and things like that, but when it comes to telling her—or anyone, really—what I need, I tend to just keep that stuff to myself.

“Growing up, we didn’t talk much about feelings.  I was raised to think that if you needed something, you didn’t bother other people with it; you just handled it.  My counselor helped me realize that while that attitude served me well in some ways, it kept me isolated and frustrated in other ways.  He helped me see that what I thought was “being responsible” was actually keeping people from being there for me.

“He asked me to do two things that were tremendously helpful.  First, he told me that if I felt tempted to watch porn or masturbate, I should remind myself that what I was really craving was some kind of connection with another person.  In fact, he explained that that’s why I usually felt depressed after I masturbated.  I wanted connection, but I couldn’t get it through porn.  He suggested that instead of just going along with the urge to view pornography, I should think of some small act of service I could do for the people around me, or some way I could reach out for connection with others.  He helped me come up with a list of things I could do at home or at the office too.

The second thing he asked me to do was keep a log everyday of how I was feeling, the high and low points of my day, and what I felt I might have needed to feel better or more in control of my life.  We focused on control because, for me, that was a big driver of my use of porn.  I’d have a bad day and feel out of control, and instead of thinking about what I could do to get things on track, I’d go online.

“It wasn’t easy for me to talk about that kind of stuff in general, especially with Maryann.  But even though she didn’t always understand what I was talking about at first, I found that if I kept trying to talk through things, we’d get there eventually.  It was weird, but I found that the more I could be open about my feelings and needs with Maryann, even when I didn’t get that need met—whatever it was—I still had less temptation to give in to porn.  I still have to keep practicing, but what I have learned in counseling has made a huge difference.  The more I go out of my way to let people in, especially my wife, the easier it’s getting for me to resist that urge to masturbate.”

Tom discovered that he was keeping people at arm’s length by not sharing his needs.  His repressed desire for real connection drove him to seek at least the illusion of intimacy with his fantasy life and the internet.  There are many different ways we isolate ourselves and try to protect our hearts, and many of them tend to push us toward sexual acting out as a way of filling the gap that’s left by our unfulfilled yet innate need for connection with others.

Many people think that only men lust, but that isn’t true.  Remember, broadly understood, lust is when you try to use another person, when you treat another person as an object that exists for your pleasure.

Annette has never had a difficult time finding a boyfriend.  Besides being quite attractive, she has a bubbly and outgoing personality that draws other people to her, men in particular.

Annette was surprised to discover that she was guilty of using the men in her life.  She was out with friends at a bar.  As usual, she didn’t bring any money with her.  She didn’t normally have to.  There was always some guy who was willing to pay for a drink or an appetizer.  But this one time, one of her friends—actually a guy she has a little crush on—criticized her when she asked if he would mind buying her a drink because she had “accidently” left her wallet at home.

“He said he knew it wasn’t an accident,” Annette said.  “That we’ve been out together plenty of times and it’s always the same thing.  He said he’d be happy to buy me a drink or even dinner if I wanted, but only if I promised to pay him back. He said that he didn’t like how I used guys to make me feel good about myself.  He thought I was a better person than that, and he didn’t feel like being used or supporting my using him.

“I was furious.  In fact, I made an excuse to go home shortly after.  I mean, how dare he talk to me like that, right?  But when I calmed down, I had to admit that he was mostly right.  I like that guys are attracted to me, and I use it to get things from them, even when I have no intention of going out with them.  It has been a long time since I’ve been in a real relationship with someone, and I haven’t even missed it!  It’s funny.  My girlfriends all talk about guys who make relationships all about them.  They say that guys only want one thing, but I’m not sure I was really all that different.  It wasn’t about sex for me, but I was still using guys to stroke my ego.  All I had to do was sit there and smile or flip my hair.  It’s silly I know, but it works, and, after a while, it got to be enough for me.  I didn’t realize how little I was settling for.”

Annette had to reckon with a hard truth—that she was using her sexuality in a self-serving way, that she had reduced herself to an object of desire and men to objects of gratification.  In doing so, she had denied herself the connection to others that would have allowed her to be valued as a person and to treat the men in her life as real persons in return. 

Of course, we don’t just long for connection with other people.  We long for ultimate connection with God.  G. K. Chesterton once noted that “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”  He wasn’t just being cheeky.  Remember, the St. Augustine who joked, “God give me chastity, but not yet!” is the same St. Augustine who discovered that his heart would remain restless until it rested in God.

We can never draw close enough to another person to completely satisfy our longing for communion.  No matter how close our relationships become, we still long to be closer.  No person will ever be enough to make us feel totally complete.  That’s because our human relationships can only point to the one, ultimate relationship that will satisfy us ultimately—our relationship to God.

Even so, we can achieve the maximum fulfillment from all of our relationships, not just our romantic ones, by practicing the heavenly virtue of chastity. 

enjoying Christ

The word “blessed” means happy.  Jesus, in bringing us the Word of God, teaches us that he wants us to be happy, blessed, with the fullness of life.  He tells us that the path leading to God is a path of joy.  With his Word, he describes for us the path to true happiness (opusdei.org).

From the Navarre Bible:  Christ teaches us that the source of the quality of human acts lies in the heart, that is, in a man’s soul, in the depth of his spirit.  “When we speak of a person’s heart, we refer not just to his sentiments, but to the whole person in his loving dealings with others.  In order to help us understand divine things, Scripture uses the expression ‘heart’ in its full meaning, as the summary and source, expression and ultimate basis, of one’s thoughts, words, and actions.  A man is worth what his heart is worth” (Bl. J. Escriva, Christ Is Passing By, 164).

Cleanness of heart is a gift of God, which expresses itself in a capacity to love, in having an upright and pure attitude to everything noble.  As St. Paul says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil 4:8).  Helped by God’s grace, a Christian should constantly strive to cleanse his heart and acquire this purity, whose reward is the vision of God.

As always let us talk to God about the above topic, ideas, examples during the quiet moments of our conversation with Him every day and listen to what other insights He tells us for our own personal life and relationships that we may be happy on earth until He calls us see Him face to face.

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky