LUST A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer Delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor, 6/20/2004 Lust is at the heart of our humanity. Lust is about desire, ambition, yearnings, the forbidden. Lust is in the midst of our politics, our stories, our very existence. Lust is natural, a point made by Lucretius in his salute to Venus, the goddess of love: "Yea, through seas and mountains and tearing rivers and the leafy haunts of birds and verdant plants thou dost strike fond love into the hearts of all, and makest them in hot desire to renew the stock of their races, each after its own kind." ("On the Nature of Things") A 21st century scientist, Melvin Konner, speaks of nature's role in our lustiness this way: " In evolutionary time...there is no designer (that is, no Venus, no goddess, no God--KWP). There is only the blind action of natural selection, sifting genes." This gift of Venus or blind action does not necessarily make us happy or wise. The philosopher Simon Blackburn, in his delightful long essay on lust, notes that "Nature makes fools of us. We are puppets of our hormones and genetic programs. But nature repays us with pleasure...(she) has done the best she could. She generated lust, and left it up to the way we relate to the world...to direct its serpentine paths." It is not likely that we will be able very often to direct the serpentine paths down which lust lures us. Think of the lust for power that overcomes some political leaders and leads them into disaster. Poor old Harold Stassen exhausted his life running for president every four years for more than four decades, without even a ghost of a chance of winning or of contributing some important new ideas to the American political process. Think of the lust for gold that drove thousands westward in pursuit of precious nuggets. There were too few such nuggets. They were too hard to find. Most of these people floundered badly and ended their lives in misery. We associate lust mostly with sexuality. Here too, perhaps above all else, lust drives us mad. Think of Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich. Think of the poet Edna St.Vincent Millay, always bedding this man and that one and occasionally a woman she found desirable. Think, honestly, of our own lives, our own fantasies, our own moments of tasting forbidden pleasures that were oh so sweet, till they ended and we felt foolish and guilty. Human life, full of lust, is not a system designed to run smoothly or rationally or even happily. It is just the system that we are a part of. We know no other. Best understand it as well as we can so that we can live with some measure of good sense and joy. Let us begin with a sort of definition. Although lust has a wider involvement than just sexuality, that is the arena in which the word is most often and most pointedly used and the way in which I shall use it for the most part today. Lust is desire, described by one writer as intense and by another as enthusiastic. It is desire for sex (or power or gold) for the sheer pleasure of it, without regard for any other consideration. Sappho, the 6th century BCE Greek lyric poet, captured the feeling of this desire in this fragment of a poem: "whenever I catch sight of you, even if for a moment, then my voice deserts me and my tongue is struck silent, a delicate fire suddenly races underneath my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears whistle like the whirling of a top and sweat pours down me and a trembling creeps over my whole body, I am greener than grass at such times, I seem to be no more than a step away from death but all can be endured, since even a pauper..." (The fragment ends here.) If lyricism is not your way of understanding, here is a more sober definition, this one from a medical source: "The feelings of sexual desire are best understood as an emergent property of at least four interlocking physiological systems, at least eleven different regions of the brain, more than thirty distinct biochemical mechanisms, and literally hundreds of specific genes supporting these various processes." Lust impels us to pursue the person or object or goal that raises such feelings in us, impels us to the point of obsession in some cases. Humanity has long understood these things, even without a sophisticated knowledge of genetics and psychology. Eastern thinkers pushed in the direction of full engagement with sexual experience as a means of deepening not just the pleasures but the longevity of life. The Kama Sutra from India and numerous graphic art works from Japan give the details of heightening and extending sexual pleasure. Taoists in the second century developed a theory that lust was the path to immortality. An emperor was said to have attained this state by having sexual relations with 1200 women. A sage was said to have lived to a great old age by making love to 10-20 young women every night. Plato offered three myths to explain the drama of lust. One had to do with two horses tugging at our souls, one towards libidinous activity, the other towards more restrained acts. A second myth envisioned an original unity of male-male or female-female or male-female, and saw lust as a yearning to attain that original unity once more. The third myth pictured an ascent towards the divine and union with God as a form of religious lust. In each of the myths, Plato makes clear that we are not fully aware of what we want. That ignorance is part of the uncontrolled power of lust. Our society has been most deeply affected by Christian understandings of sexuality. The ideas of Paul and Augustine have been most influential in Christian thought and continue to have enormous influence in the Roman Catholic Church to this day. Paul wrote in I Corinthians that "it is well for a man not to touch a woman." He allowed for marriage because of the temptation to immorality, but he believed that the best way to live was single and sexless. Lust is evil. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine put forth a comprehensive view of sex as a grievous danger to humanity. In his CONFESSIONS, he called himself " a slave to lust...As a youth I had been woefully at fault, particularly in early adolescence. I had prayed...for chastity and said, 'Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.' For I was afraid that you would answer my prayer at once and cure me too soon of the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled." Lust is a disease. Lust, in Augustine's mind, was about "the lustful excitement of the organs of generation. And this lust takes control not only of the whole body and its outward members, but also makes itself felt within...the pleasure that results is the greatest of all bodily pleasures...But even those who delight in this pleasure are not moved to it at their own will...but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves...Justly is shame connected with lust." Lust is shame. All this because of what Eve and Adam did in the Garden of Eden, disobeying God and allowing their own desires to blind them to being obedient to their Creator. Thus did they become subject to the will of lustful desires. Thus did it happen, according to Augustine, that all the children of humanity from that point on, "children born of carnal lust as a retribution in kind for the act of disobedience...contracted original sin." Small wonder that two centuries after Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great described lust as one of the seven deadly sins, joining pride, avarice, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. If this dour view is not the only Christian way of looking at human sexuality, it certainly has had staying power. The current Catholic Encyclopedia writes of lust as leading to "blindness of mind, rashness, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, self-love, and excessive attachment to the material world." John Updike observes of this still prominent attitude that "the whole scene seems damned. What right-thinking man or woman would not quickly abandon so treacherous a mine-field for the monastery or nunnery. The past century has seen a wave of new sexual attitudes in our country, from Freud's alerting us to possible hidden depths of sexual longings that, when surfaced, appear to be quite embarrassing to Wilhelm Reich's declaration that "sexual happiness is the most important thing in life" and the orgasm the "acme" of that happiness. The 20th century saw the rise of numerous and very popular sex magazines like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler. Soon movies began to feature nudity, and television began to celebrate sexual encounters of all kinds on soap operas and then in tv movies and in regular shows. Personals columns in many papers and magazines feature such lines as "If you'll scratch my itch, I'll scratch yours, no questions asked, no commitments to be made." And the most recent of almost daily erotic spam e-mails I receive was titled, "I would like to strip in front of you and rub myself...free download;" illustrative pictures accompanied this pitch. Advertisements have for decades been built around sexual come-ons, as though buying a certain deodorant or drinking a certain beer or driving a certain car could somehow make us irresistible. We live in lusty times. Sex is very much front and center in our lives, in the way we dress, the way we talk, the headlines and the stories and the rumors and not infrequently the truth of our own ways of being. If you don't find this at least a little bit stimulating, you must be an intellectual. You know what an intellectual is: someone who thinks there really is something more interesting than sex! I am not an intellectual, but I believe that sex is only part of the mix of what makes human life interesting and exciting. When we forget that, lust can overwhelm us. Whether we think of it as a sin depends in part on how we define it. If, like Simon Blackburn and Wilhelm Reich, we view lust as little more than sexual desire, then lust is a positive characteristic of our lives. If, like Thomas Aquinas and John Updike, we see sexual desire as positive but lust as the dark side of that desire--"a lustful man is one who is debauched with pleasure"--then there is something morally wrong with lust. I hold to this latter view, that sexual desire is a beautiful, magnificent, endlessly fascinating dimension of our humanity. When it goes astray, as all too easily it can, that is lust, and that is not a good thing. Like most things in life, the line between morally worthy desire and action and lustful desire and action is very thin and often hard to see. Let me suggest several aspects of lust that explain why it is harmful. The first is that lust objectifies. When we look with the eyes of lust, we do not look at a person, we look at a body. We deprive that individual of her humanity by ignoring the wholeness of who she is, body and mind, emotions and spirit, with a history and dreams and hopes and ideas and sadness and despair. Martha Nussbaum has identified seven features of objectification that dehumanize the other. We use the other as a mere tool for our ends. We deny the other autonomy. We treat the other as passive. We treat the other as interchangeable with any other body. We violate the sacred boundary that surrounds every person. We treat the other as a thing to be bought or sold. We treat the other as a thing without feelings, thoughts, or desires of their own. This is lust in action. Lust objectifies. Martin Buber spoke of worthy relationships as being I-Thou relationships, in which we honor the sacredness of the Other, whoever and whatever the Other is. Buber talked of relating to not just human beings but to all the life on this planet in these terms. Make of each encounter with trees or mountains or rivers, dogs or horses or raccoons, even snakes, and certainly other men and women and children a sacred encounter. The I-Thou relationship creates a divine space. For that space to be created it is required that both parties respect the fullness of who or what the Other is. When that is not done, the relationship becomes an I-It relationship, a relationship in which one party to it is made into an object. So many marriages have foundered or survived miserably because one or both parties views the other lustfully, as no more than an object to manipulate for her own pleasure. So much of the damage we have done to the earth is because of our inability to treat the life that is not human but still vitally part of the natural world with respect. By objectifying nature and making it our plaything, we can feel free to destroy and pollute and distort for the sake of our own pleasure. A few years ago a study was made of companies that had downsized by firing hundreds or thousands of employees. The more employees fired, the more money the top executives made, in the tens of millions of dollars. The workers were just pieces to move off the board, not men and women with lives of their own and hurts and challenges and beauty and uniqueness. This is a lust for wealth and power that ignores human concerns to give pleasure to a few people. The outrageous pedophilic acts of Roman Catholic priests and others are the result of the objectification that is lust. So is rape and prostitution and at least some pornography, any situation where pleasure is the sole object and a relationship of mutuality is irrelevant. Ed Harris, a retired UU minister, in a charming little essay titled "Lust in Three Hundred Words," speaks of lust words as being not words of subjective appreciation and respect but words of objectification, like "power...prowess, seduce, ravish, and conquest." Lust objectifies. Secondly, lust involves either a lack or a loss of control. Lust can arise completely unbidden, as involuntary as fainting, a sudden spasm of nausea and vomiting, or a sneeze. We do not necessarily set out in the morning bent on "the immoderate pursuit of sexual gratification," to quote one of the ancient definitions of lust. But lo and behold, during the day or the night we can be overwhelmed. by it. Think of King David and what happened to him when he arose from a nap and went to walk on his roof. There he saw a woman bathing and "the woman was very beautiful." He sent for her, lay with her, arranged for her husband to come home from battle so he could sleep with her and mask the pregnancy for which David was responsible. When Uriah would not lie with Bathsheba because he was a soldier on duty, David arranged for him to be sent to the front of the battle lines, where he was sure Uriah would be killed. He was. (II Samuel 11) Lust led to betrayal and murder. Lust means a lack of control. It can also mean a loss of control. There are people, now mostly known as sex addicts, who really are unable to manifest control. At one time they may have been able to do so, but something has been lost. Some key factor of restraint in their personality has vanished. Lust can now sweep aside the most rational arguments against acting and have its way. There is a poem written in the 13th century about Aristotle and Alexander the Great, his student. The philosopher lectured the young warrior about spending too much time with a courtesan, Phyllis. Alexander gave her up completely. Enraged, she went to dance in loose garments outside Aristotle's window. Before long he gave way to temptation and invited her in to lie with him. She agreed, but only if he first allowed her to ride him in the garden. She sent a servant to get Alexander, who was stunned and asked his master, "Can this be?" Aristotle's response was to tell the young man that if lust could overcome even a wise man such as himself, a young one must be doubly vigilant! Whatever our past history, lust can overcome our sternest principles. That is what the image of the dirty old man is all about, a loss of control after a lifetime of righteous living. When we lack self-discipline, lust can take over our lives. The absence of control is one of the signs of lust. We know better. We just can't do better. Thirdly, lust is insatiable, all-consuming, always in excess. The Buddha said this: "I don't know of even one other form that stays in a man's mind and consumes it like the form of a woman...one other sound...smell...taste...touch that stays in a man's mind and consumes it like the touch of a woman. I don't know of even one other form that stays in a woman's mind and consumes it like the form of a man...one other sound...smell...taste...touch that stays in a woman's mind and consumes it like the touch of a man." That all-consuming image and yearning drives out all but the most necessary of human activities in the pursuit of the object of desire. Even those given to monastic discipline learned this. Saint Jerome wrote of an incessant pre-occupation with the female form that bedeviled his monastic experience. Alone with only scorpions and wild beasts in his cell, he wrote "Yet I was often surrounded by dancing girls...my mind was hot with desire." St. Teresa of Avila, among other mystics, described her experiences of mystical communion with God in vividly sexual terms, leading artists to portray her in the throes of orgasm as she encountered the Deity. The lust for God that the saints had, the lust for life that an artist like Van Gogh had, the lust for bedding women that Wilt Chamberlain had (he claimed to have slept with 20,000 women) all speak of a desire so intense, so fierce, so all-consuming that it can never be satisfied. It takes over our lives. Even though the mystics have taught us lessons about the goodness in the heart of existence and the depths of our own souls, even though the artists have given us new ways of seeing the beauty and strangeness and wonder of our world, even though Wilt Chamberlain did play a mean game of basketball, their lives did not belong to them but to the obsession that drove them to a mad pursuit of the object of their lust. In all three cases, it was never enough, for lust knows no bounds. Lust is about excess and insatiability. Lust is about being out of control. Lust is about objectification. None of these is a good thing, but perhaps something good could be said about lust, or so John Updike would argue. As several of his novels make clear, he sees lust as celebrating the "majestic power...of sex to bind souls to this transient, treacherous world." He honors the sense of the forbidden that lust brings to us as giving sex a certain savor, however wicked it might be. He reminds us that lust teaches us that sex has consequences, even if when we are caught up in lust we cannot very easily see or act upon that lesson. So what are we to do with lust? One thing will always help, and that is to embrace it in the saving grace of love. Love is satisfying. Love helps us control our worst impulses. Love always honors the preciousness and worth of the other, be it person, animal, plant, institution, system, idea, or the earth itself. In a sermon on lust, it is fitting that Augustine should have the last word. Since his teachings have had such a baleful influence on western society, it is worth remembering that he also offered sage advice about how to live-- advice not meant as a counter to lust, but it serves well. He wrote this: "ama et fac quod vis. Love and do what you will." BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Augustine, FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY, translated by Louis A. Arand S.S., The Newman Press, 1955. 2. ............, BASIC WRITINGS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE, VOLUME ONE AND TWO, edited and with an introduction by Whitney J. Oates, Random House, 1948. 3. Simon Blackburn, LUST, Oxford University Press, 2004. 4. Eustace Chesser, SALVATION THROUGH SEX: THE LIFE AND WORK OF WILHELM REICH, William Morrow and Company, 1973. 5. Michel Foucault, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME I: AN INTRODUCTION, translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978. 6. Sigmund Freud, A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYSIS, Authorized English Translation of the Revised Edition by Joan Riviere, Permabooks, 1953. 7. ..................., THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY, translated and edited by James Strachey, Avon Books, 1962. 8. John H. Gagnon, HUMAN SEXUALITIES, Scott, Foreman, and Co., 1977. 9. Richard Lewisohn, M.D., A HISTORY OF SEXUAL CUSTOMS, translated by Alexander Mayce, Harper and Brothers, 1958. 10. Lynn Margulies and Dorion Sagan, MYSTERY DANCE: ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN SEXUALITY, Summit Books, 1991. 11. Elaine Pagels, ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT, RANDOM house, 1988. 12. Reay Tannehill, SEX IN HISTORY, Stein and day, 1980. 13. Russell Vannoy, SEX WITHOUT LOVE: A PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION, Prometheus, Books, 1980. Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved