Being a teenage girl, I accept that I will have some thoughts on the opposite sex that stray in the āintimateā. I also know that brief thoughts on these sorts of things are venial sins. But how brief should they be? When does it become a mortal sin? Is it okay to think about kissing or tender embraces? Iām just having a very hard time finding the line and am feeling extremely distressed about it. I also want to know where the line is in art. What is an appropriate expression of affection in drawing or pictures and when does it go too far? Thank you. God Bless
Venial? I never considered harboring impure thoughts to be venial. If they pop into your head, theyāre not sinful. It is harboring them for the sake of the enjoyment of the sexual pleasure gained from them that is sinful. The line is definitely unclear. My approach was that if it occured during the daytime, it was important for me not to just sit around or lay around daydreaming. This meant giving up naps that I wanted to talk and occupying myself with other things. If however it occured as I was falling asleep for the night or as I was waking up in the morning, things got a bit trickier because I couldnāt just get up and do something else when I was supposed to be going to sleep.
Its important to acknowledge that consenting in your imagination tends to truly be a consent of the heart. As such, even if you try to rationalize that its a daydream about āafter your marriedā, chances are if youāre dating someone, itāll become a lot more difficult to delay the behavior youāve daydreamed about. If youāve guarded your mind, its much easier to avoid the behavior. The other thing is to be very weary about what youāre exposing your mind to when you go to bed. Just as going to bed after watching a horror movie can fill your mind as you fall asleep with frightening images, so too can going to bed after watching a movie with sexual content or listening to sexual lyrics of music influence what your mind turns to as youāre trying to fall asleep. It can be good practice not to go to bed straight after watching TV. Try reading for awhile, pray before you go to bed and give yourself time to really prepare for bed. Donāt just start zonking out in front of a TV with constant images filling your mind up with stuff that may not be appropriate.
For me, I always found that dreaming about kissing or tender embraces tended to stir up sexual feelings in me that just didnāt head the right direction. Even if they didnāt, I still found that daydreaming about men I had crushes on to not be helpful. I wouldnāt say its always sinful, but I did realize that my heart could not tell the difference very well from reality in a daydream. Thus my crush on a man would always increase the more I daydreamed of him. Moverover, the daydreams would fill in the gaps of what I knew about him. In the end I wasnāt crushing on him, but on a fictitious rendering of him from my imagination. I thus decided to strive to only think about actual memories so that any interest I developed in a man would be as much based in reality as it could be. It was important for me to fall for who the man actually was, rather than who I wanted him to be.
But in regards to worrying about sin, Iād say that if youāre getting sexual pleasure from the dream and intentionally continuing that dream for the sake of that sexual pleasure, than thatās really when youāre in the mortal sin category. Everything else I think is just stuff I learned from striving to avoid those dreams and from things I realized about dreams in general. And as for the waking up in the middle of a dream and the delay in stopping, just confess them just in case and donāt worry about it.
