Learning From Sin: Lies About Sexuality. Having a Master/Being a Master in a World of Fantasy

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.    

Learning From Sin: Lies About Sexuality. Submission is for BDSM

When I was writing erotica and my BDSM blog, the protagonist was almost always in a submissive or servant role.  There is a deep psychology behind the, "bottom," in BDSM, but I will sum up briefly what God recently clued me into regarding why I was drawn to this type of perversion of sexuality.

There is a deep seated desire placed by God within us to serve God and God alone.  There is also a deep seated desire he places in our hearts to submit our own wills to his will.  Submission to God is so deeply ingrained within the deepest parts of our souls that it is an easy thing for the world and/or the devil to twist to their own purposes.

The soul longs to submit to God, for it is made in the image and likeness of God.  It longs to be vulnerable to God's will.  It longs to open itself to even to things that seem like they are destructive.  Abraham was willing to kill his son Isaac at God's request because the desire to submit to God's will was firmly planted there.

But, when our hearts stray from God and our minds still seek a playground for vulnerability, the, "bottom," or "submissive," in BDSM play is born.

It has been my experience that there is great danger in this if the mind seeks vulnerability and submission for their own sake.  God does not want us to be vulnerable only for the sake of being vulnerable.  He uses vulnerability to draw us closer to him and to other people.  When the mindset of a submissive in BDSM takes on the attitude that punishment for punishment's sake is desirable or that subservience for subservience's sake is desirable, then this is where perversion is born.  There is no purpose in it other than sexual and psychological pleasure.  The fruits of this kind of submission are not edible fruits that draw us closer to God but rather make us dependent on more of this type of submission in order for gratification to occur.

Gratification sought only for the sake of gratification and pleasure sought only for the sake of pleasure bear nothing but pleasure that is inflicted upon the "bottom/submissive."  It is not a shared act.  It is not an intimate act.  It is an inflicted act; it is inflicted in body but most often it is inflicted upon the bottom/submissive in his/her mind.  It has been most often my experience through writing erotica that it is an inflicted gratification/pleasure of the mind.

Just like pornography but perhaps even more so than pornography, this bottom/submissive mindset of BDSM brings about a need for more of the same.  Normal sexual relations without this escape of the mind into fantasy become increasingly more difficult over time.

I don't think God desires this for his children.  For those who are married, I believe that God wants the present to in the forefront of our minds.

There are natural, God-given ways for sexual submission to occur within the marital sexual act.  There are ways that he designed our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls, that draw forth the fruits of vulnerability for the sake of intimacy, submission for the sake of sharing and growth, and service to the other for the sake of giving and receiving from each other.

It is in these tender places in our hearts, minds, and souls, that we must work to avoid perversion.  They are the easiest places for perversion to take place, in my opinion.  I believe they are so easily twisted because we always desire to make the other happy.  We desire to please God.  Keeping these types of longings in check with their true purposes and true fruits is necessary, especially for those of us who easily fall victim to the sin of submission of the mind for the sole sake of submission.