“…you ought to choose the most withdrawn and solitary place possible, convert all your joy of will into glorifying and invoking God. And you should pay no attention to these little exterior satisfactions; you should rather seek to deny them. Should a soul become bound to the delight of sensory devotion, it will never succeed in passing on to the strength of spiritual delight, which is discovered through interior recollection in spiritual nakedness.” ~ St. John of the Cross
Memories, whether of past sexual experiences or of images from pornography, repeatedly cloud the mind and stimulate the body. Oftentimes, they reemerge without our explicit consent; brought about by a fleeting sight of something erotic or of a transitory sensation. Once fully pictured inside our head, they are usually difficult to shake-off. Here, John of the Cross has several recommendations: namely, fleeing our current tempestuous surroundings in favor of a quiet and safe place were contemplation can more easily occur. In the Western Christian tradition, the most famous example of this would probably be St. Francis’ many withdraws from the turmoil within the very Order he founded to his cave in the Umbrian Mountains. Similarly, in the Russian Orthodox Churches there is a long history of hermetical practices among the laity particularly in the custom of the Poustinia (a small cabin or room used for solitary prayer and fasting in order to reach a greater union with God.) Therefore, retreats from the world should not be viewed as a failure or a capitulation; in reality, they are an attempt to gather one’s interior forces and to receive the explicit instructions required for survival that can only come from the Lord Himself.
When we are truly alone and secluded with the Lord, true intimacy is possible. At that point, we can reveal our nakedness to Him. Of the term “nakedness,” I have already written extensively; see: http://www.josephsciambra.com/2013/11/naked-before-christ.htmlYet, what has not been explored, is it use in purging ourselves of sex and porn memories. In order for this cleansing to take place, we must be alone with Christ. Only then, will we feel at-ease and comfortable enough to expose or innermost wounds and torments to God. For, in a sense, inside the solitude of the cave, we are going back to the womb: to a time before our birth; before we were corrupted by the evils of the world. At that moment, Jesus can make us into something new. As we all know so well, Christ Our Redeemer was born on a chilly and quite night inside the stillness of a remote cave. Only there, where we can listen to the Lord, and hear the angels sing, can we have any hope of being healed.