To win a wife, you need to excel in masculinity; but how can you do that if you don't have control over yourself?
Catechismal quotes: Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 6, Paragraphs 2339, 2340, 2344, 2351, & 2352.
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So in my last video, I was discussing how, with the shift of the locus of morality towards the secular world, more and more, we are approaching, we're approaching Christianity, or approaching the church in a way that's not too dissimilar from the Pharisees, where we are observing the letter of the law, we're observing the rituals, but we're missing the spirit.
Now in this video, I'm going to be talking about the sort of challenges that young men face today, particularly young men in the church.
And I'm actually going to be talking about doing the exact opposite.
Instead of worrying about how well you're performing the rituals, worry that you're pursuing, are you pursuing the spirit behind all of these rituals?
And it's going to sound, I worry that it's going to sound like I'm making an apologetic for sinning.
That is not what I'm doing.
But let's be clear about something.
So why shouldn't you sin?
Well, because it offends God.
Period.
But that's not a very useful answer.
One time, during my basic training, I asked my Master Jack, why do we do things this way?
I forget what topic it was specifically, but I said, why do we do it this way?
And he said, because you're ordered to.
Which again, yeah, sure.
Like, I'm not saying I'm refusing to do it this way.
I'm asking what's the reasoning behind it.
And, you know, I didn't say it at the time.
I didn't think of it.
But the ten principles of leadership from the Canadian military, one of them is ensure your subordinates understand the intention behind your commands.
It's not enough for a troop just to follow orders.
Okay, they're not robots.
They're not peons.
That's not what a soldier is supposed to be.
They're supposed to be thinking individuals that can react, who can adapt and overcome to any situation.
And a similar thing, a very similar thing with morality, with why we're here, why we go to church.
We don't go to church just to follow all the rules.
We go to church to become better versions of ourselves and hopefully achieve the beatific vision.
So if you say you shouldn't do something because it offends God, well, okay, yeah, and you should follow orders because you were told to.
But it's also incumbent upon you to understand why the order was given.
Now, it doesn't mean that if you don't understand, you can just do whatever you want.
Obviously, it doesn't mean that.
But you're supposed to understand why you're doing what you're doing.
Listen, fear of court-martial or fear of hellfire are both good motivators to not be an idiot.
But it's not enough.
You are not meeting your potential if the only reason you're obeying is because somebody told you to obey.
You are supposed to be a co-participant in this reality.
I'll give you an example of this.
A rather simple example of this, because we're going to be talking about sex, so let's start off with something a little bit less tempting for most of us.
Let's talk about nutrition.
You know, last week, I was at the store, and you know, I had a hankering for a chocolate bar, and so I bought one, and it tasted delicious.
And then the next day, I felt like a chocolate bar again.
So I bought the exact same chocolate bar, and the bloody thing tasted like wax.
Because, I mean, it's a cheap $1 chocolate bar from the store.
And I kind of chastised myself for buying a chocolate bar two days in a row because I never do that.
And my reward was I got a chocolate bar that tasted like wax.
Similar thing, why do we eat dessert after dinner instead of starting out with cake and ice cream?
Well, part of the reason is that eating cake and ice cream before dinner ruins your meal.
Part of the beauty of this universe is that eating is a source of pleasure.
Not just pleasure, but community.
You know, sitting down with your family to eat dinner and having a really good, healthy, fulfilling, nutritious some chicken and mashed potatoes and having a good conversation with people you love is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
And then finishing it off with a little bit of ice cream, a little bit of cake at the end.
And actually, the sugar even kickstarts the digestive process.
And so if you start off eating cake, you aren't going to enjoy, you know, the turkey.
You aren't going to enjoy the mashed potatoes.
Furthermore, you are going to quickly lose the enjoyment of it.
If you're eating cake every day, it's not special.
It's not fun.
It's not delicious.
And you are becoming obese from eating all of this.
You are becoming sickly.
You are, not only are you enjoying the food less and less, you're not able to enjoy life as much as you used to because you're overweight.
The purpose of eating is both nutritional and enjoyment.
You're supposed to enjoy eating, but if you eat in the wrong way, it's going to make you miserable.
So yes, you shouldn't eat the cake until after dinner because your parents told you not to.
But you should also understand that you're going to enjoy the cake more once you've had a nutritious meal.
So with that said, let's consider the catechism and what it says about the purpose of sex, specifically regarding masturbation, but also where it's appropriate, why we do it, what it's for.
And this is, if you want to follow along, this is part 3, section 2, chapter 2, article 6.
and just let me find the exact correct passage.
Okay.
Now, I trust that you all understand that the purpose of marriage is both procreative and unitive.
I'm not going to read you the whole catechism on that.
Okay?
I mean, look at our biology.
Humans are one of the few species that has sex even when the woman is not fertile.
Okay, sex is a great gift.
We are meant to enjoy it.
You know, like, look, God could have designed us like every other species, that, you know, the only time, you know, the mare is aroused, the only time she's sexually available is when she's in eustress.
Whereas human females, all the freaking time.
So, yeah, you are supposed to enjoy sex.
It's procreative.
It is there to create children, but it's also unitive.
It helps to bond the man and woman together.
And so we're going to skip over that.
I trust you know that already.
So let's consider offenses against chastity.
And chastity doesn't mean not having sex.
It means having sex at the right time.
Lust is disordered desire for, or, inordinate enjoyment of, sexual pleasure.
Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
When you're eating cake every day because you like sugar, not because you're hungry, and not because it's the correct time for cake, you know, that is a disordered gluttony.
By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure.
Both the magisterium of the church, in the course of constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.
The deliberate use of the sexual faculty for whatever reason outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.
So is masturbation okay?
No, it's not.
It's not okay.
All right, you are you're wasting your time.
There's a reason wanker is an insult.
Because you are you are wasting your life.
You are probably focused on the wrong thing.
You are sapping your energy.
I could go on and on and on.
Okay, the correct place to use sex is with your wife, being open to the procreative act while also using it for the unitive act, the unitive effect of it.
So yeah, it is not okay.
It's forbidden.
Get married.
Now, easier said than done.
Let me read you some of the earlier parts in this, particularly paragraphs 2339, 2340, and 2344, because this goes back to the context that I said earlier.
We are here to become better versions of ourselves.
Not to just blindly follow the rules because we were told to, but to want to follow the rules.
Chastity, which means pursuing sex at the right time and for the right reasons, doesn't mean no sex.
Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery, which is training in human freedom.
The alternative is clear.
Either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.
This isn't about blind obedience, folks.
This is about training in self-mastery.
You don't want to eat cake before dinner because A, it ruins dinner and B, you get fat.
Furthermore, whoever wants to remain faithful to his baptismal promises and resist temptations will want to adopt the means for doing so.
Again, training, developing yourself, learning about yourself, understanding, getting the intellectual understanding of the correct purpose for sex, and then learning when you are most tempted and how you are most tempted.
You know, there's nowhere in here saying that I shouldn't be drinking this, which it's white whiskey, not water.
But it does say I shouldn't be a drunkard.
And so I need to be cautious about the, I need to enjoy this, but I need to be aware of the means for enjoying it properly and where I'm tempted to enjoy it to excess.
And finally, this.
This last paragraph, 2344, because the young man that was asking me about this is beating himself up about failing at this.
Chastity represents an eminently personal task.
It also involves a cultural effort, for there is an interdependence between personal betterment and the improvement of society.
Interdependence, right there.
That is a hugely important statement right here.
Listen, when I was doing basic training, about three weeks into it, you know, one of the guys in my tent said, Hey, have any of you guys noticed that, you know, we don't want to masturbate?
Or I don't want to masturbate?
Have any of you guys noticed that?
And we started doing all this, like, oh my god, are they putting saltpeter in our food or what have you?
No, they weren't.
The reason that during basic training is that nobody was tempted to masturbation is, well, first of all, they were working us like dogs.
Two, well, actually, two is really the important one.
Okay, the major reason is because there was no temptation being shoved in our faces.
We weren't seeing half-naked women on magazines.
We weren't seeing billboard advertisements with a chick's ass that's 10 feet high.
We weren't constantly being titillated by women who were wearing low-cut tops and then complaining that guys stare at their tits.
Right now, the challenge of chastity is extremely difficult.
You know, one of the times I broke recently, I was watching, I think it was the Evil Dead or one of those classic zombie movies, and there's this one bit where one of the girls just starts stripping naked in the movie and it was like a hot wire, you know, came in through the eyeballs, straight down the spine to the bright red chakra down there.
Yeah, it goes right through you.
You know, you never know when it's going to happen either.
And so, yeah, remaining chaste, remaining focused, is very, very, very difficult.
You know, if we lived in a world where everywhere you went, there were free, delicious chocolate bars being offered, we'd all be a little bit fatter than we are.
And so I'm not saying that it's okay.
It is bad for you.
Just because free chocolate is everywhere doesn't mean it's okay to be fat.
All the same standards still apply.
Just because it's easy, just because you're constantly being tempted, does not make it okay.
It doesn't make it okay to be a little bit fat.
still fat.
And if you're engaging in masturbation, you are going to be squandering your masculine energy.
But at the same time, you are being really tempted.
And the important thing is not, and to go back to the beginning of this, is not to be a Pharisee and obsess over the literal, the literal obedience to the rules.
It's about understanding yourself, mastering yourself, not in spite of the temptation, but using that temptation to understand yourself better and thus master yourself despite the extreme temptation.
What I'm getting at is really stop worrying so much about it.
Because in a certain sense, worrying this much about it, if you're constantly focused on this thing here, you're not going to be looking to where you're going.
Stop worrying about eating cake before dinner.
Look forward to the cake after dinner, but focus on the turkey and the salad and the mashed potatoes that you have en route.
You know, have that ultimate destination in mind while also living in the moment.
What you need to be doing to master yourself and to ultimately to attract a good and decent woman who is like you and a flawed and imperfect being.
but is nonetheless focused on that destination, what you need to be doing is cultivating your masculinity.
And see, that's probably the worst thing about this constant temptation.
You know, the worst thing about lust is that you're actually degrading your masculinity.
You are regressing to this childhood understanding.
The same way, kids don't understand that, you know, like once a year we take them out on Halloween, they get to eat all the candy they want, and they get to feel miserable.
And they get to learn from that experience, hopefully.
Similar thing, if you're constantly indulging in lust, you are reverting to a very boyish understanding.
When you first have your sexual awakening, you don't know what it's for, and you're not a man yet, and you don't know how to approach a woman.
You are engaging in that.
not being a man get your eyes set on the destination Because the listen, when it comes to game and picking up women and all this stuff, now this can be...
If you are sinning really hard in this direction, because remember, virtue is all about a balance.
You know, courage is the balance between being a coward and being foolhardy.
A brave man is not going to be completely blind to the dangers.
He knows that there's dangers out there.
But he is going to boldly step forward when it is the correct time.
And so if you are all the way on the cowardly side of things, you know, maybe the way to break out of that is to be a little bit foolhardy.
Hopefully not too foolhardy, but, you know, you're course correcting the whole time.
And you're learning about yourself and you're getting better.
So game, picking up chicks, all of this stuff.
Guys that have never been inducted into masculinity, guys that have never, they've been told just be nice guys, be weak, go along, do whatever, you know, breaking out of that and learning that chicks actually kind of dig jerks to some degree.
You know being a man is somewhere in between those things and it's somewhere a lot better than those things So what you need to be doing is focusing on that, focusing upon your masculinity.
Stop worrying about the lust so much.
Okay, like you're supposed to have a high sex drive.
You're a young man for crying out loud.
Stop focusing on that so much and start focusing more on becoming a refined, idealized form of a man.
upon your masculinity.
And, you know, like one last thing regarding church specifically.
First of all, anytime you go to church on Sunday, there is a generalized confession of sin.
So you don't need to go to reconciliation every week because you cracked after seeing a billboard or a chick wearing a short skirt or what have you.
All right, reconciliation is, well, you should be going once a year, at least.
You know, once a month is probably better.
But reconciliation is about reorienting yourself.
It's when you've really stepped out of line and you want to fix that thing.
The habitual sin that you're working on and that you're learning about yourself from it and you are getting rid of it bit by bit, you know, every week.
Like sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, but you have that general progress forward.
That is basically what a venial sin is.
Okay, it's mortal sins that you have to go to confession for.
All right, the venial sins, work on those.
Get better.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
You don't need to obsess about them, however.
And, you know, like it's an absolute shame that our locus of morality is so far from the church, that we've forgotten so much of art, culture, theology.
Yeah, that's terrible, but it's also the modern day.
That's what we're all dealing with.
Okay, and ultimately the priests, they're dealing with it as well.
You know, if they start talking about vanity or gossip, people would be, they'd have a lot of trouble understanding that.
And that's just the reality of it.
It doesn't mean you stop going to church.
Okay, you still need to go get the Eucharist.
You still need to get that grace inside of you.
Focus on your journey.
Focus on becoming masculine.
Because the masculine engenders the feminine and the feminine engenders the masculine.
Keep your eyes down the road.
Resist, adapt, and overcome the temptations of this world.
