Underestimating The Spiritual Impact Of Pornography

i was talking with a young man yesterday who was confused about some things going on in his life. Specifically, his emotions were haywire and he was obsessed with death in recent weeks. The more we talked the more i could see that something had a hold on him. As we talked i learned that in the last month he had discovered soft porn on video filing sharing sites on the Internet: sites such as YouTube and others.

Most of what he viewed would not be considered pornography by many people, but it is. And by consuming those videos, he was opening himself to demonic influence. The result was spiritual and emotional upheaval in his life.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the force animating pornography, whatever form it takes, is truly from the Evil One. But it is. And we should not be surprised when there are spiritual implications from our involvement with it.

 

 

It Doesn’t Work Like That

A brother who is starting to wrestle with his addiction said to me recently that he realized something very important:

It would be a whole lot easier if we could just pay $10,000 _ or any price _ to have this addiction removed. But it doesn’t work like that.

No. It doesn’t.

To be truly healed; to move to a point where an addiction does not rule you, takes a journey. You can’t pay to have it taken from you. You can’t skirt it and try to go around it as though it were merely a traffic jam on the interstate. Instead, you must walk a path through it.

This is why the language of a journey is crucial for us. This is why all the great stories through the ages which tell us of adverturers on a quest ring true in our hearts.

The Fellowship of The Ring had to make the trip to Mordor to destroy the ring, they couldn’t mail it in. Likewise, Dorothy defeats the wicked witch after taking a journey; Private Ryan is saved after a band of brothers goes on a quest to rescue him; and Narnia is saved when the Pevensey children journey in the land and restore its glory. On and on the stories tell us of the path we must walk.

Addictions are dismantled when we take the journey of healing our hearts. It works like that.

 

 

Transformation

A new addition on the Essays page, which you will notice has been renamed as “Essays And More.” i added an audio file of a talk my wife and i gave this past summer at our church, in which we tell the story of transformation in our marriage as He exposed my sin and we walked through the healing process. The title is _A Marriage Transformed_, and i hope you will take a moment and listen.

There are too few stories like this being told in the Christian subculture today, even fewer in our churches.

 

 

Slaying The Dragon

The British writer G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

i have been pondering this quote recently as i rework my manuscript. If we are going to slay the dragon of pornography addiction, it will require thinking about our lives in the manner Chesterton suggests here. The dragon does exist, but more importantly it can be beaten. To do so requires thinking of our lives mythically; we are WarriorPoets in a battle that has all the import of Frodo returning the Ring to Mordor.

 

 

Celebration Of Beauty

One of the great benefits of my healing has been that i now can celebrate real beauty because the eyes of my heart have been opened. Before my Confession and my addiction coming into the light, my ability to see and appreciate true beauty was, at best, veiled because of the way pornography had infected me. i was twisted. My eyes were darkened. My heart was hard and cold.

This time of year is always powerful for me because October is the month in which the Confession was made. And, it is a month with rare beauty here where i live. Today, like so many days since my Confession, i was blessed to see and appreciate true beauty; the sort of beauty which i missed so much of the time when i was in my addiction.

The brilliance of autumn colors, as leaves _ fire-like orange and glowing yellow _ blanketed the ground drew me in and literally lifted my heart. Last night’s moon, crescent shaped and seemingly close enough to touch. The brisk morning air that reminds you you are alive. All of these things share a beauty to be savored. i had been so dead to it all for many years.

But when the mercy of God collided with my addiction, resulting in the redemptive train wreck of being “outed”, one of the benefits _ beneath the pain _ was a new heart and new eyes with which to really see the goodness God had given me.

Ever since that fateful October night years ago, it has been a powerful experience for me to actually apprehend and celebrate beauty. Porn was a plague of locusts on my soul. God has since restored what was ravaged more than a 100 fold.

Let the celebration begin.

 

Whirlwind

It’s been a whirlwind week. i can hardly believe it.

i have had some very interesting conversations with different people about pornography addiction and the path of healing. i am always very encouraged when i meet someone who is submitting to the process of confessing and then working a plan of recovery in which that person is dealing truthfully with regard to the underlying causes of the addiction.

Such was my case on a couple different occasions this past week. Humility from a once-proud addict is so refreshing. When an addict understands the Life-or-Death nature of addiction and starts walking toward the Light, good things happen. Such humility is very attractive.

The journey of healing always takes us back to our wounds. We are forced to deal with those scars with honesty in order to be changed. When we embrace a life of full disclosure, and renounce a life of concealment, we hear words of meaning and restoration spoken over us by God Himself. Questions of identity and purpose are fuel for the addiction in the first place. I used to run to porn when faced with feelings of inadequacy from relational pain, among other reasons. It is such pain that lies beneath all of our indulgences.

Every man who runs to pornography is seeking answers to fundamental questions about his own heart. He will never find those answers in the pages of a porn magazine; the scenes of an X-rated video, or the inside of a so-called gentlemen’s club.

This week i have been talking to men who are really understanding this for, perhaps, the first time. And they are responding with small steps, as much as they have faith for, toward wholeness. If they stick with the process, God may actually make them real men. It is exciting to imagine.

 

Passions

Brady comments:

I have often found my own “fight” to be one of subduing my urges. This is approaching the fight in the wrong manner. It is a matter of changing out passions: the earthly for the heavenly. Seeking and “connecting to the God of Eternity.” As this passions grows the other dies. As the light enters in, the darkness leaves.

Brady’s thoughts are insightful. Urge suppression never really works as a way of dealing with temptation, let alone addiction. Even if in the short term it seems to garner favorable results, sooner or later it comes crashing down under the weight of its own pretense.

The pretense is: the urge is real because we were designed for passion, intimacy and _ quite frankly _ ecstasy. This is why in C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, Wormwood refers to God as a hedonist.

God Himself has designed pleasure. Our Enemy can only twist something good to defile it and attempt to trap us with passion which is selfish and misdirected.

Brady mentions that  it is a matter of “changing out” our passions. In other words, don’t be fooled that the way to deal with something like pornography addiction is to become less passionate. Rather, see it from God’s perspective: be passionate about the things He is passionate about. Then your passions will guide you in the path of Life.

 

Curious

Just a note. The post on the Nightline Porn Debate at Yale continues to get a significant amount of hits, despite being from two months ago.

i would love to know what readers think of it, as well as what accounts for its overall popularity.

 

The Barbarian Way, Part 2

As i mentioned in the previous post, Erwin McManus’ The Barbarian Way was a delight to read. The pleasure i received while reading this book was not based on anything  new and earthshattering, but was due to the fact that he spoke a language dear to my heart, and so few speak it.

i wrote in the previous post that Christianity has become too reasonable. i stand by that to the extent that statement means we have forfeited the mystical aspects of the faith. McManus writes it this way:

Somehow Christianity has become a nonmystical religion. It’s about a reasonable faith. If we believe the right things, we are orthodox. Frankly, whether we ever actually connect to God or experience His undeniable presence has become incidental, if not irrelevant. We have become believers rather than experiencers. To know God in the scriptures always went beyond information to intimacy. We may find ourselves uncomfortable with this reality, but the faith of the scriptures is a mystical faith. It leads us beyond the material world into an invisible reality. We become connected to the God of eternity. Who you are at the core is spirit. God is spirit. To walk with God is to journey in the spiritual realm.

This is crucial for us to understand. And it came up in conversation the other day as i was talking with some people about why so many men see little to no real progress or freedom in dealing with pornography addiction _ or any addiction for that matter. But especially when it comes to battling pornography, we make the mistake of trying to fight it in our own power; as though it were not a spiritual dilemma. At its core, pornography is Satanic. No matter how sweet the characters in the pictures may seem, the whole world of pornography is dark and evil.

How many years did i spend trying to “fight” my addiction in my own strength? i cannot begin to count. Christianity is about connecting to the God of eternity and having intimacy with Him. By definition, this is a mystical relationship. And the power of God unleashed in the spiritual realm is what will defeat our addiction. We must battle using His divinely powerful weapons.

 

The Barbarian Way

It’s been a rough period of days since my last post; the tyranny of the urgent really takes its toll.

Responsibilities. Heartaches. The weariness of living in a fallen world and dealing with the Enemy’s assault on my heart.

At the same time, it is never hopeless. And so the journey takes its turns; it rises and falls along a path with hills and valleys and adventures which, ultimately, lead toward Life. In fact, even the journey along the way is imbued with Life, as He unfolds His Life to the Full in the midst of everything else.

In the midst of this, i recently finished reading a short gem by Erwin McManus titled The Barbarian Way.

Simple and direct, this book has a lot to offer. i probably will be referencing it heavily in the next few posts.

McManus hits on something when, writing about Jesus and John the Baptist he says:

Jesus and John were considered barbarians, even though they expressed themselves in different ways. But at the core they were the same. They lived and moved in the mystical. That is, they had a unique and transcendent connection to the Creator of the universe. Guided by the voice of God, they cared little how others perceived that. What was invisible to others was clear to them. Their lives could not be explained apart from God.

Those of us claiming to know and follow Jesus have lost something. Christianity has become too reasonable. It has become nearly scientific. Sadly, the whole idea that a person would experience God has become anathema to many Christians. This is crucial to those of us dealing with addiction issues. Or living free from those addictions.

Whatever language we use, the point is the same: living free from an addiction to pornography (or any addiction) requires following The Barbarian Way, being Wild at Heart, living as one who is Dangerous, Passionate, Alive and Free. We are all talking about the same thing. We must take a journey into authentic masculinity and a recover, as McManus calls it, A unique and transcendent connection to the Creator of the Universe.