"God did not call us to impurity."
(1 Thessalonians 4:7)

The lust of the flesh is a permanent element of  man's fallen nature.  Thomas Merton believed that sexual appetites were the most difficult of all natural appetites to control and tended to completely blind the human spirit of all interior light.  Because of lust, there is a strong tendency for men and women to turn true, other-centered sexual love into a mere self-centered satisfaction.

Like all of the deadly sins, lust has certain offspring such as blindness of mind or perversion of heart, rashness, inconstancy, and inordinate self-love. Lust invites us to close our eyes to our values, to harden our hearts against the needs of others, to pursue genital pleasure for its own sake without weighing the consequences, to focus so much on our own satisfaction that other moral instincts are pushed aside.

The deadly sin of lust is an offense against ourselves, other persons and society.

Against ourselves; Lust is a kind of slavery in which the person is in bondage to uncontrolled passions and desires and fantasies.  Lust is evil, remarks Karl Menninger, not because it is about sex or pleasure, but because it corrupts or destroys the personality of the participants.  In private many people testify that they are powerless over their sexual urges and that they have sacrificed some of their most tender human feelings because of the power of lust.

Against other persons; In lust I am concerned with the fulfillment of my own needs and desires, with little or no thought being given to the needs, interests, and desires of the other.  This kind of focus on self is certainly characteristic of many expressions of lust, such as rape, incest, and pornography.

Against society; There is little doubt that the fruits of lust affect the social fabric.  We have a veritable epidemic of children born out of wedlock, many of them to teenage girls.  Countless other children are destroyed through abortion.  Against families and mates by endless hours and dollars given over to the porn industry.

Lastly, lust has a dimension of cruelty to it.  More often than not, lust is about dominance and abuse.  In its blind drive to satisfy itself, lust takes advantage of the vulnerability or weakness or innocence of others.  Lustful people are seldom honest.  They manipulate and seduce others into a genital relationship, but they do not necessarily love or even care about the other person as an individual.  Lust involves no real choice of a partner, nor does it take responsibility for the consequences of its acts.

(Tomorrow we will examine chastity as the answer to lust.)