Sex is really a primitive desire that can interfere with spirituality.
Our society is loaded with messages that sex is great. This draws an huge amount of attention toward feeding the libido with inner images and thoughts of sex.
I contend that sex is not that great and that interest in sex drastically reduces the attention available for prayerful thoughts and inner images.
“If you don’t stop it you’ll go blind” is very realistic in a spiritual sense.
Learning to eliminate the desire for sex at an early age is most beneficial for both spiritual and religious success. Similarly, anything that occupies human attention, like television and computers, is the cause of spiritual death.
“If you don’t stop it you’ll go blind” can be unnecessarily shaming, in a spiritual sense…and shame, put in the place of an appropriate sense of guilt for real sins, is a weapon in the arsenal of the devil.
St. Paul didn’t say that those who were on fire ought to just take a cold swim and cut it out. He recommended that they marry. Then in the letter to the Ephesians he famously made a very favorable comparison between a husband and his wife with Christ and his Church. As he so succinctly put it “
Indeed, I wish everyone to be as I am, but each has a particular gift from God, one of one kind and one of another”
1 Cor. 7:7 Those who can realize the gift of chastity without marriage must not so lack generosity of heart that they come to imagine that their kind of chastity must be the only gift there is!
I like the way C.S. Lewis imagined the devil would look at this issue (from Letter 19,
The Screwtape Letters…boldface mine, of course).
"…*You complain that my last letter does not make it clear whether I regard being in love as a desirable state for a human or not. But really, Wormwood, that is the sort of question one expects them to ask! Leave them to discuss whether “Love”, or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are “good” or “bad”. Can’t you see there’s no answer? Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us. Thus it would be quite a good thing to make the patient decide that “love” is “good” or “bad”. If he is an arrogant man with a contempt for the body really based on delicacy but mistaken by him for purity—and one who takes pleasure in flouting what most if his fellows approve—by all means let him decide against love. Instill into him an over-weening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might humanize it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form.
If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, “noble”, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage. For marriage, though the Enemy’s invention, has its uses. There must be several young women in your patient’s neighborhood who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them. Please send me a report on this when you next write. In the meantime, get it quite clear in your own mind that this state of falling in love is not, in itself, necessarily favorable either to us or to the other side. It is simply an occasion which we and the Enemy are both trying to exploit.
Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.*
