PRAYERS VS. ORGASMS

The passage below is taken from Andy Nowicki's new publication, Ravages of the 'Rough Beast,' now available on Kindle, and in paperback.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine famously recalls his youthful prayer: “Oh Lord, make me chaste… but not yet.”

Some chuckle at the brazen effrontery of this obviously ill-intentioned sentiment; others (like the aged, chastened Augustine himself), shake their heads in dismay, noting how its utterance indicts their youthful selves. None, however, can dismiss this hypocritical prayer as irrelevant to the human struggle for self-mastery.

One knows that it is best to be chaste, yet one suspects it would be rather more fun to put off chastity for as long as possible, until one’s dying moment if one can; consumed with a kind of canny, worldly, bargaining spirit, one tries to postpone proper and godly behavior until such time when, presumably, one would be less inclined to find unchastity psychically appealing anyhow, i.e., during the dotage of senility.

One does not have to be chaste oneself to comprehend and respect the value of chastity. I, your humble interlocutor, cannot in any sense lay claim to chastity of body, mind, or spirit. Having aged well past the supposed time of the “heyday of the blood” hasn’t helped. For one such as myself, even prayer is of limited utility, at least when it comes to easing my mind. This isn’t to say that prayer isn’t generally efficacious; God forbid that I would presume to assert such a thing! Clearly having a good prayer life is a highly desirable trait, one that I (if I may put it so) greatly covet.

For many of us, the spirit of unchastity is, however, so deeply ingrained that prayer can never bring the type of release from care that an orgasm can. Attempts at extended prayer, for such souls as these, can only bring the nauseating reverberation of futility to one’s mind. Praying, in fact, just reinforces one’s conviction of personal impotence. One prays… and yet nothing seems to change. In fact, prayer is a reminder that one cannot change the course of events; in some important way, in fact, such a notion seems to be the overall point of prayer; you pray over something because it is beyond your command to alter it or otherwise apply correction. The act of prayer is meant to reinforce humility; hence, one traditionally falls to one’s knees in supplication, signifying one’s bodily and spiritual subservience to one’s Creator.

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, prayer is also supposed to bring to the pray-er a sense of harmonious communion with the divine, and an openness to the notion that the divine is indeed graciously listening to our pleas, and perhaps even enabling our wishes to be fulfilled. In its ideal form, it is seen to have a unitive effect, wherein one’s mortal self is commingled with the divine, having the salubrious result of infusing one’s soul with a greater degree of serenity and purpose.  

But the problem with prayer in an age consumed with the primacy of fleshly appetites is that it fails to bring what one needs when one needs it, leaving the pray-er in a state of increased agitation, feeling even less “spiritual” than ever before. Such is my dilemma, and such is the dilemma faced, no doubt, by many others, even if they don’t care to admit it.     

Such incontinence of spirit stems from an inconstancy of mind. One not properly trained in the discipline of restraint slides very easily into enslavement to passion.

The “demon” that I named earlier, then, is at its root, one that is immensely hostile to chastity. It has cunningly promoted unchastity as “liberation,” a term which contextually conflates licentiousness and liberty. But authentic liberation must be rooted in self-control: a man either keeps a lid on his passions, or he winds up being ruled by them.

A world filled with men who are ruled by their appetites and who scorn constraint, is in fact a world which necessarily lurches towards instability, chaos, and perpetual tyranny.

Purchase Andy Nowicki's Ravages of the Rough Beast