Brownies and Sex
Brownies are delicious. I love brownies. Particularly German chocolate brownies made with almonds or peanut butter with real ingredients; ingredients without artificial preservatives. Real ingredients make for the most delicious brownies. I’m even willing to wager that 98% of the people reading this article love brownies. Brownies are even delicious to the point that some are unable to wait until they’re finished baking, take them out of the oven, eat them, and as a result suffer from a stomach ache. How many of us are guilty of that? Not being able to wait for the heat to bake the brownie? Imagine how different your experience would have been if you had waited. I would say, being patient would have given you the greatest reward. And that’s what God wants for you! What He wants for me.
At this point, you may be wondering: what do sex and brownies have to do with each other? Well, I’ll get there in a minute. First let’s talk about sex. Even though we live in a crummy culture where harmony of opinion is elusive, our culture and the Catholic Church agree on one thing: sex is awesome! Through sex, a man and a woman have the power to bring an eternal, unique, and unrepeatable soul into this world. Sex are the wedding vows made flesh! With this new information in mind, take a second to consider this: if people get sick from doing something as silly as not being able to wait to eat fully baked brownies, how much more sick (emotionally, physically, or psychologically) can human beings stand to experience if they treat something as sacred as sex as a mere tool of enjoyment?
Now that we have established that sex outside of marriage can hurt us, I want to pay close attention to three virtues and three vices that promote chastity or lust. St. John Paul once said that “Chastity is a difficult, long term matter; one must wait patiently for it to bear fruit.”
1. We need patience. If patience is the virtue, what’s the vice? That’s pretty easy, you already know it’s impatience. As St. Cyprian once said “for as patience is the benefit of Christ, so, on the other hand, impatience is the mischief of the devil.” So the message is clear, in order to uphold chastity, we must strive to be patient and remember that any impatience is a work of the devil and not of God.
2. Next, it’s clear that we need courage. This may or may not be that obvious, but we need courage to overcome our cowardice. Why cowardice? Well, it’s pretty simple. Think of this way, we need courage because chastity is difficult, God commands us to be “very courageous” so that we might not give up when life gets hard (Jos. 1:9). Take a minute to consider what great things you have accomplished because you had courage—it’s far better to be courageous than to surrender to cowardice.
3. Lastly, we need to remember the importance of temperance! Temperance (or self-control) is necessary because we cannot base our goals with the pleasure we will get, because if we do, we run the risk of becoming its slave. Think of friends who don’t have self-control and are controlled by things—whether it’s their videogames, their phones, sex—the pleasure they receive is controlling their lives incapable of noticing the harm that they are doing to real love.
You may still be thinking, I understand, but why should I strive to be pure? What actual benefit will I receive? Thanks for asking! According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The “pure in heart” are promised that they will see God face to face and be like him. Purity of heart is the precondition of the vision of God. Even now it enables us to see according to God, to accept others as “neighbors”; it lets us perceive the human body—ours and our neighbor’s—as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of divine beauty.”
In other words, when you become pure in heart, you will be able to imitate Christ and see God face to face. That’s a promise that Jesus gave to us—if that isn’t motivation enough, I don’t know what is!
