God endowed our human nature with the capacity to give and receive love, and to beget new life, through the sexual act. In itself, it is good and, in fact, holy.
Lust is the disorder in our sexual drive due to the mystery of sin. It turns the giving of love into the selfish taking of pleasure. It involves a communion of bodies but not of spirits. Lust focuses not on the person, but on the person's body. It demeans individuals by judging their value according to their physical attractiveness and availability. It strips the body of its dignity by turning it into merchandise, and robs sexuality of its mystery by reducing it to be an instrument of raw pleasure.
Lust does not only bring down personal relationships, it also degrades the culture and morals of society. It encourages self-abandonment to the pursuit of sensual pleasure and the lowering of censorship standards, under the pretence that sexual indulgence is natural and healthy, while chastity and abstinence are psychologically harmful. If lust is healthy and good for us, why are there so many broken families, so many abortions, and such dread of bearing children?
By not recognizing lust for what it is, and by encouraging us not to control it, our culture trains us to relinquish self-restraint in every other dimension of life. It trains us to obey every impulse or appetite. While claiming freedom to live as we desire, we actually lose our freedom. Instead of controlling our passions, we allow our passions to control us. Reducing life to the search for self-gratification, we become self-centered and ignore the needs of others.
C.S. Lewis described the way lust twists our minds and appetites in this way: "You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act — that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?"
Some say that former generations did not talk about sex; I say that, regrettably, today's generation does not talk about morality, and we must do so. We need to recognize that indulgence in lust, even at the level of interior fantasy, is destructive. Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28).
How can sexual fantasies be controlled? Jesus says bluntly, "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna" (Mt 5: 30). The first step, then, is to eliminate the sources of temptation. This includes keeping custody over our eyes and imagination, and avoiding relationships, places, words, and actions that we know will lead to temptation.
Next, we should understand that lust is a disordered search for love. It is like an itch. The more you scratch it, the more it itches. The only way to be free is not to scratch it. We cannot drive lust out, but we can crowd it out by replacing it with superior and more rewarding experiences of real love. The most important source of love is God, so, to be free from the fires of lust, we must turn to God in prayer. He alone can satisfy our heart's hunger for love.
