Upon attending church today, I swallowed hard when I heard today's Gospel reading from Matthew 23:1-12. The verse that stopped me in my tracks was, "Do not be called 'Master;' you have one master, the Christ."
As I have written elsewhere, I will repeat briefly here in case someone randomly reads this post without reading any of my previous posts. Before I returned to the Church and sought forgiveness for my sins, I had been writing erotica and erotic romance as well as an erotica blog as a side business/hobby. The works I had been writing all had BDSM themes, and usually the characters were in service to a master or masters as part of one of the main themes of my writing. Many of those same characters had dilemmas because they had to choose between different masters.
Ok, this is perhaps more than you, my reader, wanted to know, but I have to put it all out there because I felt called to leave church and immediately write a blog post on this topic because it is so important.
The human person seeks to have a master.
Jesus addresses this fundamental human longing in today's gospel, and it is a key idea to why some perversions of sexuality (BDSM) draw people so strongly, especially with the written word. There are people who act out BDSM but there are many, many more who buy written works containing BDSM themes as an escape to reality.
It has been my experience that when one shuts out Christ, the soul still seeks its master. We were made with this longing, this yearning for God so boldly written upon our hearts that when we shut out Christ we cannot stop seeking a master. We take many paths through dark valleys and then wonder why we experience discontentment with seeking out a human master, even if it is only within the world of fantasy.
"It's only a fantasy," I told myself time and time again when writing erotica. "It hurts no one."
What a lie! I lied to myself over and over again. The many rooms of our minds contain parts of hearts, parts of our souls, our yearnings, our longings, our passions, our emotions, and so many other parts of ourselves. When we fill many rooms with destructive fantasy, our minds become a house of mirrors in which those good longings become perverted until we no longer recognize them for the good things that they are.
Christ is our master, and he wants us to be of service to him and to others in his name.
And the desire to be master over someone else? This desire isn't something I wish to address in today's blog post because it contains too many subtopics for a single blog entry.
In Christian, married life, there is much freedom to living in the present. In contrast, seeking to always distract oneself from the present with fantasy is destructive on multiple fronts, not the least of which is that it opens the door to losing site of the many gifts one's spouse gives in the married life. It opens the door to disappointment in one's spouse because a person can never live up to a fantasy, regardless of how harmless the fantasy may seem at the time.
My prayer as I learn from my past is to be ever mindful of who my spouse is, how wonderful a man he is, and how blessed I am that God gave him to me to be my husband.
