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The Standard of Liberty Voice
For God,Religion,Family,Freedom
A publication of The Standard of Liberty Foundation
www.standardofliberty.org
August 20, 2012, #64

Virtue Brings Light; Indulgence Brings Fog


The fog creeps in on little cat feet . . . begins Robert Louis Stephenson’s famous little poem. Fog is an interesting phenomenon. It creeps in silently and covers everything. In fog there is no black and white, all is gray. It makes it difficult to see clearly, to differentiate, to discern. This is how the devil works. He progressively grays the distinctions between right and wrong.

We now live in a sexually permissive culture in which God’s bright, clear rules have melted into fog as thick as pea soup. As a result, a great many young people’s sexual development has been interfered with; secret excesses and perversions such as pornography addiction, promiscuity, and homosexual experimentation are epidemic.

C. S. Lewis wrote about fog, too, as it pertains to chastity. “Virtue, even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog.”As followers of Christ, complete chastity (holiness, excellence, purity inside and out) is the standard, the goal. If people fall short of this standard, and they often do, the rules are still in place and we know we should repent, relying on Christ, and strive on according to those rules to get back in the light. Like the hymn says, “Let us remember and be sure our hearts and hands are clean and pure.”

Is this difficult? Yes, especially today. C. S. Lewis (even 60 years ago) said there are three reasons “why it is now specially difficult for us to desire—let alone achieve—complete chastity.”

“In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. . . . Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. . . . Every sane and civilised man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others . . . unless you are going to ruin your whole life.”

“In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying [and we add: even after what they consider enough trying]) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. . . [P]eople quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.”

“We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity—like perfect charity—will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity ( . . . or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and on the other, that we need not despair in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”

Lewis’s third reason for the difficulty of being totally chaste is that we mistakenly refer to chastity as some dangerous sort of “‘repressed’ sex.” He expertly explains this away and puts the responsibility right where it should be. “[T]hose who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes.”

There exist organizations, supposedly in the LDS mainstream though not official, which are doing families and individuals a great disservice. But you make the call. If their goal is not excellence, holiness, or purity, but merely to “diminish” wayward desires (expressed in their mission statement) aren’t they doing Lewis’s fatal thing: sitting down content with something less than perfection? The word diminish is especially troublesome. What does that mean and who decides how much “diminishing” is enough? We pray that such groups will abandon foggy, irreligious goals that indulge wayward individuals and make concessions toward political correctness. Indulgence and concessions can lead only to spiritual darkness and risky physical behaviors. To have integrity we must take a clear orthodox stand by offering the light of truth to souls lost in today’s murky sexuality soup.

 


--Stephen and Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty

 



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