DEEP LOVE

'The deepest love is not a painful lack seeking satisfaction for oneself, but a bountiful overflow seeking the good for one's beloved, in generative acts both large and small.'

Leon Kass & Hannah Mandelbaum, Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption and the Way of Israel, p.88.

LONELINESS & LUST

'Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornopraphy omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.173. 

THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP

'The best advice...for resisting lust is not to get an Internet filter (although you should do that too!), but to have good friends. If we have genuine friendships in which we learn to give and receive love in a healthy and satisfying way, we will be less inclined to wander off looking for sham substitutes and quick fixes.' 

Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.178. 

LUST, SINGLENESS & MARRIAGE

'The difference between marriage and celibacy must never be understood as the difference between having a "legitimate" outlet for sexual lust on the one hand and having to repress it on the other. Christ calls everyone - no matter his or her particular vocation - to experience redemption from the domination of lust. Only from this perspective do the Christian vocations (celibacy and marriage) make any sense. Both vocations - if they are to be lived as Christ intends - flow from the same experience of the redemption of sexual desire.'

Christopher West, Theology of the Body for Beginners, p.66.   

IDENTITY

'We are not who the pornified media tell us we are. We are not valuable only if we can attract and arouse another's lust. In fact, lust devalues us by reducing us to the level of a thing to be used and discarded. Our true value, our true worth and dignity, comes from the fact that we have been chosen by Love and for Love, and that Love is an utterly gratuitous and free gift. We have been chosen to participate in infinite love, in love without measure, in ecstasy and bliss beyond imagining. This is what we desire. This is what we're designed and destined for. Somehow we know it. And this Love is ours is we would only open to it and receive "the gift."' 

Christopher West, Fill These Hearts, p.108. 

LUST

'The sin of lust has its root in the belief that God's law is not enough to satisfy our longing for intimacy. We suspect that God is unfairly withholding from us something that we ned. Both the Old and New Testaments use the metaphor of marriage to symbolise our relationship with God. Our sexual drive reflects our inherent desire to be reunited with God. When we pervert and misdirect that desire, we are unfaithful to God, just as Jesus said that a married person who allows lust to thrive in the heart is unfaithful to his or her spouse.

Many single men and women imagine that after they are married they will no longer struggle with lust, only to find that after marriage that the struggle continues. Even the most satisfying marital relationship does not completely fill the void that each of us has at our core. Marriage was not meant to satisfy our need for God, only to reflect it. A happy marriage is a tremendous blessing, but inly after we abandon the illusion that it will satisfy all our needs.'

Michael Mangis, Signature Sins, p.47.

CRAVINGS

'How does the infinity of God relate to our cravings? Our longings seem insatiable to us. We have even made the situation into a self-evident law, the law of diminishing returns. This law says that the more we do something, the less and less we enjoy it. Might it be that our insatiable longings also relate to an infinte God? Might the unending nature of our desires point to the unending nature of his infinity? Who but an infinite Person can gratify seemingly infinite longings?'

Steve DeWitt, Eyes Wide Open, p.36.

LUST

'...lust in my experience follows disgruntlement nearly always.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Volume III, p.921.

LUST

'Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.'

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.54.

LUST

'To follow Jesus means self-renunciation and absolute adherence to him, and therefore a will dominated by lust can never be allowed to do what it likes. Even momentary desire is a barrier to the following of Jesus, and brings the whole body into hell, making us sell our heavenly birthright for a mess of pottage, and showing that we lack faith in him who will reward mortification with joy a hundredfold. Instead of trusting to the unseen, we prefer the tangible fruits of desire, and so we fall from the path of discipleship and lose touch with Jesus. Lust is impure because it is unbelief, and therefore it is to be shunned. No sacrifice is too great if it enables us to conquer a lust which cuts us off from Jesus.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p.83.