Concupiscence of the Flesh
July 21, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? I was edified by a
young person working in the laundry when I saw an envelope on top of my night
table with a note saying compensation for the damaged dress, sorry. She is confirming my first impression of
her. This girl arrived a little ahead of
me in the place and when I arrived I asked for her help to clean the cabinet I
already filled with my things after I noticed the cabinet needed scrubbing of
stubborn stains or molds. As I did the
job with her, I noticed she works well. A
quiet young lady and works well. As the
days went on I would notice she loves her job and is diligent in the task.
The
group is preparing secretly for a program requested by a birthday celebrant
within the week. I volunteered a number
for the young ones in the staff. I do
not know why I remember this piece of narrative in verse about a mother but entitled
“Papel de Liha” by Ompong Remigio. The
article was a Palanca Awardee. It is a tribute to mothers, especially
stay-at-home moms, whose constant work may have roughened their hands, but have
also kept the home going smoothly. This
wondrous verse narration is detailed with colorful illustrations that capture a
mother’s daily and dedicated routine, a child’s appreciative love and the
mother’s working and loving hands that are so much more than sand paper.
Then
it was time to look for the reference book of two other articles, I requested for
two other numbers in the program for two other birthday celebrants in the month. I found the book and never have I appreciated
that book in the past due to some unpleasantness surrounding it before it came
to be. But after a decade now, I look at
it with appreciation and gratitude. I
find it beautiful, rich in many ways and inspiring. All I can say is that God is so wonderful and
cannot be outdone in generosity. He gives
what He commands and commands what He wills as St Augustine prayed.
Now
let us get back to business and continue with the third word of Christ from the
Cross on Lust (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A
Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
4 Lust
The pleasure
becomes sinful at that point where, instead of using it as means, we begin to
use it as an end. To eat for the sake of eating is a sin because eating is a
means to an end, which is health. Lust, in like manner, is selfishness or
perverted love.
It looks not so much to the good of
the other, as to the pleasure of self. It breaks the glass that holds the wine;
it breaks the lute to snare the music. It subordinates the other to self for
the sake of pleasure. Denying the quality of “otherness,” it seeks to make the
other person care for us, but not to make us care for the other person.
We are living today in what might properly be called an era of carnality. As the appeal to the spiritual relaxes, the demands of the flesh increase. Living less for God, human nature begins to live only for self, for “no man can serve two masters: For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other” (Matt. 6:24).
Peculiar to this era of carnality is
the tendency to equate the perpetuity of marriage with the fleshly pleasure, so
that, when the pleasure ends, the bond is presumed to be automatically
dissolved. In America, for example, there is more than one divorce for every
four marriages — an indication of how much we have ceased to be a Christian
nation and how much we have forgotten the words of Our Lord: “What therefore
God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).
The regrettable aspect of it all is
that with this increased sin there is a decreased sense of sin. Souls sin more
but think less about it. Like sick persons who are so moribund that they have
no desire to be better, sinners become so calloused they have no yearning for
redemption. Having lost their eyes, they no longer want to see; the only
pleasure left them, in the end, is to mock and sneer at those who do.
It is never the pure who say that
chastity is impossible, but only the impure. We judge others by ourselves and
attribute to others the vices from which we ourselves refuse to abstain.
Some reparation had to be made for
the sin of lust, which in Old Testament times became so hideous to God that He
would have withheld the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah could
but ten just men have been found within their gates.
Our Lord began making reparation for
it at the first moment of the Incarnation, for He chose to be born of a virgin.
Why did He choose to transcend the laws of nature? The answer is very simple.
Original sin has been propagated to every human being from Adam to this very
hour, with the exception of Our Lady. The prolongation of this taint in human
nature takes place through the carnal act, of which man is the active principle,
for man was the head of the human race. Every time there is generation of one
human being by another, through the union of man and woman, there is the
propagation of original sin.
The problem confronting the Second
Person of the Blessed Trinity in becoming man was: how to become man without at
the same time becoming sinful man, that is, man infected by the sin to which
all flesh is heir? How to become man without inheriting original sin? He had to
be a true man in order to suffer for man, but He could not be a sinful man if
He were to redeem man from sin. How could He be both man and yet sinless?
He could be man by being born of a
woman; He could be sinless man, without original sin, by dispensing with man as
the active principle of generation — in other words, by being born of a virgin.
Thus it was that when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she
was to conceive the Messiah, whose name would be called Jesus, she answered:
“How can this be done because I know not man?” (Luke 1:34). She had made the
vow of virginity, and she intended to keep it.
The angel answered that the
conception of the Son of Man would take place without man, through the power of
the Holy Spirit, who would overshadow her. Being assured of her continued
virginity, she accepted the motherhood of God Incarnate. “Be it done unto me,
according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).
So it was that reparation for sins
of the flesh began the first moment of the Incarnation through the Virgin
Birth. That same love He manifested for virginity, in the beginning, He
re-echoed in the first sermon of His public life: “Blessed are the clean of
heart: for they shall see God.”
Later on, He challenged the scribes
and the Pharisees, who sought to malign His good name, to find anything impure
in His life: “Which of you shall convince me of sin?” (John 8:46).
The final atonement and reparation
is made on Calvary, where, in reparation for all the impure desires and
thoughts of men, Our Lord is crowned with thorns; where, in reparation for all
the sins of shame, He is stripped of His garments; where, in reparation for all
the lusts of the flesh, He is almost dispossessed of His flesh, for according
to Sacred Scripture, the very bones of His body could be numbered.
We are so used to looking upon
artistic crucifixes of ivory and the beautiful images in our prayer books, that
we think of Our Blessed Lord as being whole on the Cross. The fact is that He
made such reparation for sins of the flesh that His body was torn, His blood
poured forth, and Scripture refers to Him on the Cross as a leper, as one
struck by God and afflicted, so that “there is no beauty in Him, nor comeliness
. . . that we should be desirous of Him” (Isa. 53:2).
Our Lord chose to go even further in
reparation for the sins of lust by dispossessing Himself of the two most
legitimate claims of the flesh. If there was ever a pure and legitimate claim
in the realm of the flesh, it is the claim to the love of one’s own Mother. If
there is any honest title to affection in the universe of the flesh, it is the
bonds of love that attach one to a fellow man. But the flesh was so misused by
man and so perverted that Our Divine Savior renounced even these legitimate
bonds of the flesh in order to atone for the illegitimate.
He became totally unfleshed, in
order to atone for the abuse of the flesh, by giving away His Mother and His
best friend. So, to His own Mother, He looks and bids farewell: “Woman, behold
thy son”; and to His best friend He looks and bids farewell again: “Behold thy
mother.”
How different
from the world! A mother will deprive her son of an advanced education in a
foreign land, saying: “I cannot give up my son”; or a wife will deprive her
husband of good material advancement through a short absence, saying: “I cannot
give up my husband.” These are not the cries of noble love but of attachment.
Our Lord did not say: “I cannot give up my Mother.” He gave her up. He loved
her enough to give her away for her life’s plan and destiny — namely be our
Mother.
Here was a love that was strong
enough to forget itself, in order that others might never want for love. He
made the sacrifice of His Mother that we might have her; He wounded Himself
like the pelican, that we might be nourished by her motherhood. Mary accepted
the poor exchange to carry out her Son’s redemptive work. And at that moment
when Jesus surrendered even the legitimate claims of the flesh and gave us His
Mother, Mary, and His best friend, John — selfishness died its death.
Two lessons are
to be learned from this third word from the Cross:
1. The only real escape from the
demands of the flesh is to find something more than the flesh to love.
2. Mary is the Refuge of Sinners.
If we could ever find anything we
loved more than the flesh, the demands of the flesh would be less imperative.
This is the “escape” a mother offers her boy when she says: “Don’t do anything
of which your mother would ever be ashamed.” If there is that higher love of
his mother, the boy will always have a consecrated sense of affection,
something for which he will be willing to make sacrifices.
When a mother makes such an appeal
to her son, she is merely re-echoing the lesson of the Savior, who, in giving
His Mother to us as our Mother, equivalently said: “My children, never do
anything of which your Mother would be ashamed.” Let a soul but love that
Mother, and He will love her Divine Son Jesus, who, in order to make
satisfaction for the unlawful pleasure of the flesh, surrendered to us His last
and lawful attachment — His Mother.
The psychology of this enthusiasm
for a higher love of Jesus and Mary as an escape from the unlawful attachments
of the flesh is this: by it, we avoid undue concentration on lower loves and
their explosions. Think about your mouth for five minutes, and you will have an
undue concentration of saliva. Think about your heart for five minutes and you
will believe you have heart trouble, though the chances are nine out of ten
that you have not. Stand on a stage and think about your hands and they will
begin to feel as big as hams.
The balance and equilibrium of the
whole system is disturbed when an organ is isolated from its function in the
whole organism, or divorced from its higher purpose. Those people who are
always talking, reading, and thinking about sex are like singers who think more
about their larynx than about singing. They make that which is subordinate
to a higher purpose so all important that the harmony of life is upset.
But suppose that, instead of
concentrating on an organ, one fitted that organ into a pattern of living —
then all the uneasiness would end. The skilled orator never feels his hands are
awkward because, being enthused about his speech, he makes his hands
subordinate to their higher purpose.
Our Lord
practically said the same thing: “Be not solicitous . . . what you shall eat.”
So it is with the flesh. Cultivate a higher love, a purpose of living, a goal
of existence, a desire to correspond to all that God wants us to be, and the
lower passion will be absorbed by it.
The Church applies this psychology
to the vow of chastity. The Church asks her priests and nuns to surrender even
the lawful pleasures of the flesh, not because she does not want them to love,
but because she wants them to love better. She knows that their love for souls
will be greater as their love for the flesh is less, just as Our Lord died on
the Cross for men because He loved His own life less.
Nor must it be
thought that the vow of chastity is a burden. Thompson has called it a
“passionless passion, a wild tranquility.” And so it is. A new passion is born
with the vow of chastity: the passion for the love of God. It is the consolation
of that higher love that makes the surrender of the lower love so easy. And
only when that higher love is lost does the vow begin to be a burden, just as
honesty becomes a burden only to those who have lost the sense of others’
rights.
The reason there is a degeneration
in the moral order and a decay of decency is that men and women have lost the
higher love. Ignoring Christ their Savior, who loved them unto the death on
Calvary, and Mary, who loved them unto becoming Queen of Martyrs beneath that
Cross, they have nothing for which to make the sacrifice.
The only way love can be shown in
this world is by sacrifice — namely, the surrender of one thing for another.
Love is essentially bound up with choice, and choice is a negation, and
negation is a sacrifice. When a young man sets his heart upon a maid and asks
her to marry him, he is not only saying, “I choose you”; he is also saying, “I
do not choose, I reject, all others. I give them all up for you.” Apply this to
the problem of lust.
Take away all love above the flesh,
take away God, the crucifix, the Sorrowful Mother, salvation, eternal happiness
— and what possibility is there for choice? What is to be gained by denying the
imperious and revolutionary demands of the flesh? But grant the divine, and the
flesh’s greatest joy is to throw itself on the altar of the one loved, where it
counts its sorrow a cheap price for the blissful joy of giving.
Then its greatest despair is not to
be needed; it could almost find it in its heart to inflict a wound that it
might bind and heal. Such is the attitude of the pure: they have integrated
their flesh with the divine; they have sublimated its cravings with the Cross;
having a higher love, they now make the surrender of the lower, that their
Mother may never be put to shame.
She looked upon His torn and
bleeding flesh hanging from Him like rays of a purple sunset, and she came to know
how much flesh sinned by seeing what His flesh suffered. What better way in all
the world was there to measure the heinousness of sin than by seeing, when left
alone with Him for three hours, what it could do to Innocence and Purity.
She is the Refuge of Sinners not
only because she knows sin through Calvary, but also because she chose, during
the most terrifying hours of her life, a converted sinner as her companion. The
measure of our appreciation of friends is our desire to have them about us in the
moment of our greatest need.
Mary heard Jesus say, “The harlots
and publicans will enter the kingdom of heaven before the scribes and
Pharisees” (see Matt. 21:31). So she chose the absolved harlot, Magdalen, as
her companion at the Cross. What the scandalmongers of that day must have said
when they saw Our Blessed Mother in the company of a woman who everyone knew
was the kind who sold her body without giving away her soul.
Magdalen knew that day why Mary is
the Refuge of Sinners, and certainly our day, too, can learn that if she had
Magdalen as a companion then, she is willing to have us as companions now.
Mary’s purity is not a holier-than-thou purity, a stand-offish holiness that gathers up its robes lest they be stained by the sinful; nor is it a despising purity that looks down upon the impure. Rather, it is a radiating purity that is no more spoiled by solicitude for the fallen than a ray of sunshine is sullied by a dirty windowpane through which it pours.
We almost seem to forget that there
is a Cross at all. He begins to look more like a red rose, and she begins to
look like the stem. That stem reaches down from Calvary into all our wounded
hearts of earth, sucking up our prayers and petitions and conveying them to
Him. That is why roses have thorns in this life — to keep away every disturbing
influence that might destroy our union with Jesus and Mary.
If Christ
should come on earth some summer day
And walk
unknown upon our busy street
I wonder
how it would be if we should meet,
And being
God — if He would act that way.
Perhaps
the kindest thing that He would do
Would be
just to forget I failed to pray
And clasp
my hand, forgivingly, and say,
“My child,
I’ve heard My Mother speak of you. (Mrs. Frederick V. Murphy, “Acknowledgment.”)
— Victory
over Vice
I had the chance to listen to the speech of Senator Mike
Johnson in a Family Conference recently and he quoted the former American President
John Quincy Adams famous saying “Duty
is ours, results are God’s!”
Indeed! It is your duty and mine to pray
for our global family’s peace and good.
And besides that is what you and I can do best, take on our best weapon,
that is, call on the Almighty God, implore Him like little children do, which
you and I are, for peace in our global family all over the world.
And
once again as always talk to Him about the above thoughts in the quiet moments
of your conversation with Him in prayer.
Heed what He tells you.
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
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