SIN IS CROUCHING

I got on social media yesterday. Harmless- just to post my daughter's birthday pictures. Then curiosity, then a night of algorithms, and then confession this afternoon. It was not the first time I have made that confession, and the priest did not act like it was.

Later that night I prayed, and I was thinking about something that is going to sound funny, so bear with me. I was thinking about how I have always been a sexual predator.

I know what that phrase does. We correlate it with the nasty stuff, with children. I am not saying ANY of that. Here is what I mean. Other than immediate family, I have never looked at a woman in a way that was not sexual. A brother in my men's group said the same thing out loud once and I have not been able to unhear it. Every woman I meet, I instantly size up on a scale of sexuality. I sat with that last night, with what a predatorial nature that is, and with what it looked like in my own life when I let it run free.

The scriptures always tie lust and sexual immorality to idolatry. We get accused of idolatry as Catholics, so we know the word, but we do not always sit with what it actually is. It is communion with false gods. Communion with the demonic. Usually in the form of sacrifice, and sharing a meal, and eating that sacrifice. That is what sacrifice means. Not just killing something, but eating it.

So how can fornication and adultery and the rest of it be paganism? Start with what marriage actually is. The way we renew the sacrament, the way we consummate it, is the marital embrace. The two become one flesh. That union has a specific relation to God. He loves that man and that woman as one in a unique way. For me to have sex with a woman who is not my wife, or to fantasize about a woman who is not my wife, is me tapping into that and stealing it. Synthesizing an experience with God that I have no right to.

Which is why I keep circling back to magic and the sacraments and how thin the line is between them. If prayer is the lifting of the intellect to God, then it is the directing of everything, all our focus, all our spiritual attention, toward Him. Now think about what fantasizing is. Think about the exchange that happens, how you are giving that same attention to someone else, and how the people making that content are putting it out there in order to receive it. Something is going somewhere. That is not a metaphor.

Here is the part that sounds worse written down than it did in my head. When I meet a woman, I size her up. All my life, since puberty, maybe before. And I keep asking why. Why do I crave it. Why do I want the affection. It is not the end goal. It is not about getting what you want from these women. It is about being wanted. Desired.

Because all my life I have felt abandoned, alone, not wanted. As a child I did not have a father. My mom was a drug addict. The list goes on, and everybody has their own list. I stayed on couches. I slept on floors. I was always a burden. Nobody wanted me.

So I learned humor, and I learned this magic. If I saw a coworker, if I saw someone at work, even at church, I would mentally size them up, and if I wanted their affection I would get it. I would play the long game. If it takes five years, it takes five years. I will be whatever that person needs me to be. I will learn their favorite music. I will be a mentor to them. I will make them laugh. Whatever the itch is, I will scratch it, and eventually I get what I want, whether that is just having them flirt with me or whether that is seeing them nude.

And if you think about the desire to see everybody naked, it is almost a gnostic thing. That is knowledge that is not mine to have. The shallow part is that it all looks the same. There is a spectrum, but it is the same. Ron White has that bit about the eighty year old woman asking if you want to see her breasts, and you say yep, all right, roll 'em up. It is true. The curiosity is the thing. Not the seeing.

So what is all that longing? The longing is that I want to be known and wanted. That is why I run to these things.

Which means I have to figure out how not to be a predator. Sin makes us predators. That is the nature of sin. It teaches us to hunt for what God intended us to receive as gift. God warns Cain that sin is crouching, waiting for him. That crouching is a predatorial posture. Look at the movement across those first chapters. In the garden the fruit is given to Adam freely, the tree almost saying take it. After the choice, now you work, now you till the ground through thistle and vine. Then with Cain it goes further, and God tells him he will not even be able to produce anything. Not only do you have to fight through it, you will not get anything out of it. Cain is the first predator, the first one to kill.

We say we are made in the image of God, but that translation is not quite right. We are imagers of God. We are in the image of God when we are doing what God does, when we abide in grace and live the virtues. The same works the other way. We become predatorial in nature when we do what the demonic does. Being in communion with that spirit changes you into its likeness. You practice looking at people as objects and it becomes instinct. You practice seduction and it becomes a skill you cannot put down. Your nature becomes more like its nature.

I know that I have always been predatorial with women. I have always looked at them as an object for my own satisfaction and done whatever I needed to do to have dominion. That is not a season I came out of. That is a thing I walk around with.

So how do I have purity of heart? How do I see in every woman my daughters? That is the big one. That is flipping the script, and that is only a grace from God.

The birthday pictures are still on my phone. That is where all of this started yesterday, and it is the only reason I opened the thing at all. A man puts up pictures of his daughter because he is proud of her, and then twenty minutes later he is somewhere else entirely, and the same eyes are doing both.

I am praying for that childlike heart of the infant Jesus, for that purity, to be able to see these souls in just a fraction, just a drop, of how Christ sees them. At their infinite value. Worth shedding His blood over.