Consider The Floor

A Practical Guide To Guarding The Senses

I know I was talking about my next post being a diseased ramble on St. Catherine of Sienna’s encounter with Christ where He told her, “You are she who is not, I am HE WHO IS,” but there’s a lot to unpack about that and this is a more pressing issue, I think. Or, at least, it may be pressing to some people. Maybe I’m the last guy on planet Earth to figure this out, but whatever. So.

Sins of the flesh, right? The apparition of Our Lady of Fatima told the children that more people go to hell over this than anything else. It’s certainly a huge problem nowadays, since unless you ruthlessly curate your social media feeds, and immediately get rid of anything that even kind of points to this kind of content, you’ll soon be inundated with it. My home parish is fairly conservative and a good meeting place between a pious Novus Ordo parish and a traditional parish. Like, the kind of place where we have the NO Mass, but a lot of women will wear a veil and we’ll put in Latin and Greek into our Liturgy.

But even at Mass I’ll see someone who has decided that modesty just isn’t for them. Or, they’ll be dressing in a way that, I’m sure, they think is modest, but really isn’t. And this can cause problems for people (not just men) who have issues with the 6th and 9th Commandments. Shameful as it is to admit, I’m one of those people. Which, anyone who’s known me from back before I became Catholic would be able to tell you how in that cesspit I was, and from one guy who’s been there to others, it can be tough to crawl out. Or let yourself be dragged out. Or be dragged out, kicking and screaming.

Whichever.

When I became Catholic I knew I couldn’t be doing that kind of stuff anymore. I have to stop. So I deleted what I had on my hard drive, and tried looking up advice on how to combat it. And, really, there isn’t a lot of advice on it, because people don’t like getting into the nitty gritty and it’s difficult to do so without being explicit. So I’m going to make an attempt. Hopefully it helps someone. It’s helping me, I think.

Virtue is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets, and the easier it gets to lift heavier loads. Wise man say: To become strong one must lift many heavy burdens. But what are these heavy burdens and how do we lift them? It’s not as easy to figure out as, “Just go to the gym, put the weights on the equipment, and start moving them up and down.” That’s simple, and were it so easy.

So, how do we exercise virtue? You commit acts of the particular virtue you want to enhance in yourself. Now, with Faith, Hope, and Charity, we can only predispose ourselves to the virtue, God is the one that actually gives it to us. That’s why those are the “Theological Virtues.” The “Cardinal Virtues” and their sub-virtues are able to be honed through human effort.

If you want to increase in Faith, Hope, and Charity, you perform acts of them, such as saying certain prayers, and if you’re serious God will give you more of them.

If you want to increase in the Cardinal Virtues, you also perform acts of them, such as fasting and almsgiving, and your virtue in that area will increase, little by little. And some it’s easy to work out, right? For Prudence, you consider the ramifications of your choices and actions, and choose the one that is most in line with what Christ taught. For Temperance, you fast, or have less alcohol than you normally would (cough).

But what about Chastity? What exactly is “an act of Chastity?”

I haven’t found many good answers to this online, so I came up with my own. This is out of a lot of self-doubt, self-hatred, and serious struggle with The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, so your mileage may vary. But I do have a couple of good suggestions, I think, that came out of this.

One thing you can do is limit your time online, or time on certain websites. Set a timer, and when it goes off that’s it, time to get off Twitter. Go read a book, watch a movie, bake a cake, take a walk, whatever it is. Just don’t be there anymore.

And, while you are there, as I said before, ruthlessly curate your feed. And I mean ruthlessly. Our Lord didn’t talk about, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” for nothing. That, as many have already said but I’ll belabor the point, is not about actual bodily mutilation. It’s about getting rid of things in your life that are “near occasions of sin.” Those things can also be people. So if you’ve got a friend online who is constantly posting naughty things, unfollow them. By all means remain in contact, check in on them sometime, but if they’re just hosing down your feed with pornography, you can’t follow them if you want to grow in virtue. They’ll just drag you down.

That’s two, and online can be more difficult to control than you know, especially if you’re on an algorithm-driven feed like Twitter’s (I’m not calling it “X” that’s stupid) For You tab. In that case you have to whip that algorithm like a rented mule and rigorously rip out everything even tangentially related to that stuff. It works, I’ve done it, and I very rarely ever see anything that’s genuinely meant to be titillating anymore. Block accounts, click the “I don’t like this” button, etc. Just get rid of it and let the algorithm know you don’t want that stuff on your feed anymore. It’ll get the net eventually. May have to switch to a new account with a new algorithm if it’s particularly bad, but this is the price of virtue and trying to live like Christ wants us to.

Okay, so that’ll handle online, where you actually can control everything that comes onto your screen with a little work. What about real life? You can’t just delete that chick in the yoga pants at Walmart, or worse, Holy Mass. So what’s some practical acts of chastity you can start performing in the real world to grow that virtue in yourself?

Buy a baseball cap and start wearing it everywhere.

No, I’m not joking, this works.

See, in horse races they put blinders on the horses to keep them from being distracted while they’re running and you can probably see where I’m going with this already.

Use the hat like horse blinders. I do this all the time. I can’t control what other people wear, but I can control whether or not I look at them wearing it. The ballcap makes it much, much easier to just not look. Draw the brim down over my eyes and only look in directions I know are safe. We’re running the most difficult race known to man, the Race to Heaven. I know I want to win, and I don’t need distractions to trip me up while I’m running. Get the ballcap, and use it effectively.

A wise man once said, and I wish I could remember his name, but here we are, “The sin is not in seeing, the sin is in looking.” The baseball cap prevents you from looking, if you’re using it right.

You can also simply turn around. This happens to me often at work, where there are quite a few beautiful women that I try to avoid due to my personal issues. It’s not them, it’s me, but when I’ll get caught in a conversation and they’ll cross eyeshot, I’ll simply position myself to where I can’t see them anymore. I don’t get up in their face and rant about modesty. To be perfectly honest, like I said, the problem is with me, not them most of the time. So I’ll walk around the person I’m talking to until I’m staring at a wall, or something like that. Just getting the temptation out of my vision. Out of sight, out of mind.

I also wear glasses, and without them my eyesight is pretty bad. Like, I can discern shapes and colors, and even recognize what things are or who people are if I know the area or the person well enough, but it’s very fuzzy and I’m not making out any detail without getting within about six inches of whatever I’m looking at. Not quite Mr. Magoo, but I’m getting there.

Does anybody remember Mr. Magoo? Just me? Eh…

Anyway, I can’t always wear the ballcap, right? I can get away with that in the grocery store, or Walmart, or at work, or on the street, but at Mass? Oh no. Men do not cover their heads in the House of the Lord. So what to do in that instance?

Just take your glasses off and put them in your pocket.

Then you literally can’t look at whatever might be distracting you. Your obligation is to hear and participate in Holy Mass in person, not to see the priest, or even the Host (though you should try to, it’s very heartening). I had to do this in one particularly trying instance with a lot of immodestly dressed women. In a Cathedral, no less. If I remember right, I got through it okay. It was rough, though.

But what about people who don’t need glasses?

In that case, and in many others, I turn to the title of this little trek down how my brain works for that.

Consider the floor.

Have you ever really looked at the floor? I mean, really looked at it? There’s a lot more going on there than you might think. It has interesting patterns and designs, just like people do. It has a lot of interesting flaws and cracks, just like people do. There can even be cool bugs crawling across it. The floor can be beautiful, or it can be ugly. Just like you and me.

But, more importantly, when you’re staring, I mean really looking at the floor, you are not able to look at anything else. This is useful for when at work, or out and about, or during Mass. Although, if you’re having this issue during Mass I would advise staring at the Tabernacle, or at the biggest crucifix within eyeshot. This will lead to a lot of holy and pious thoughts about what He did for you, specifically, and us, generally.

When you stare at that crucifix, with the corpus firmly fixed to it, and you see those nails in His hands and feet, and that hole in His side from St. Longinus’s spear, and that crown of thorns on His brow, and are truly working interiorly to cultivate a sense of sorrow for sins, it should be very difficult to go immediately back to whatever it was you thought you wanted to look at.

Alternatively, you could carry a rosary on you and just pull it out and stare at the crucifix whenever you feel tempted. Or, you know, start praying it. The Holy Rosary is the spiritual sword of Our Lady. Don’t be caught without your blade, gentlemen, lest the enemy overcome you. I don’t know about you guys, but my personal favorite Bible verse is Job 7:1. And we’re going with the Douay translation, because it goes far harder than any other I’ve read. “For the life of man on earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling.”

This is the world we live in. Everywhere you turn are monuments to sin and misery. Our nation’s culture has almost wholly been given over to hell. They run rampant through our streets, the internet is practically devoted to them. St. Carlo Acutis, pray for us. Spiritual warfare is extraordinarily, unequivocally real, and you need weapons to fight back. So start training. Start praying.

Say your Angelus at 6, noon, and 6 every day. Say your rosary every day. Read Scripture every day. Go to Mass as often as possible. Receive the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist as often as possible. Pray to God to break your chains of addiction or whatever it might be, and to purify your imagination. Utilize binding prayers, plenty and often. Pray the St. Michael along with the Angelus. Ask Our Lady to help you to see women, men, whatever it is, and sexuality as a gift God gave to us, and not something for your personal, animalistic gratification.

And I have this one from an exorcist, Fr. Ripperger, and he hands it out on almost every podcast or whatever I see him on, so it must be cool to spread around.

You can ask Our Lady of Sorrows, under that specific title, to reveal the source of your constant returning to this sin. I did it, and it worked, and now I know what I need to really work on. It was wild, too. Permit me to indulge in the story, so you can get a little personal testimony.

I asked Our Lady of Sorrows to please reveal to me, if God allows it, the reason I keep returning to that sin, specifically. I wanted to know so that if I really did have a problem with chastity, I could start working harder on it. Well, it turns out it wasn’t really chastity I have a problem with.

Days after doing this, I was in the smoke pit at work, not even thinking about this problem. I was thinking about work and what job I was going to do next and yadda yadda etc. Suddenly I get what I call “touched in the brain,” where a thought that isn’t mine slides in and makes itself very known, is unignorable, and definitely didn’t come from my own mind or reasoning power. It is also definitely not a thought that leads me further from God, and this is how I know it was from Our Lady. It was a very simple thought, and maybe it wasn’t these three words exactly but this is how I remember it…

“You’re lonely, stupid.”

Which, if Our Lady called me stupid (essentially) to my face then to be perfectly honest that’s fair, because I am. I should’ve been able to work that out on my own, but as Fr. Ripperger puts it I was attempting to put out these brush fires around chastity and didn’t know that loneliness and fear of being alone were absolutely destroying my home base while the troops were out dealing with my sexual immorality.

But the important part here is that she did reveal to me, by the grace of God, the actual root cause of my problem. So, now my task becomes working on fear and loneliness, and reminding myself constantly that with the Communion of the Saints, and more importantly Our Lord and Lady, and with my Guardian Angel and Patron Saint, I am never really, actually alone.

And yeah, that can feel like cold comfort when all you want is a physical hug from someone, anyone, or to cry on someone’s shoulder because life is making you want to…forcibly disconnect yourself from God’s Minecraft server, shall we say. But, in reality, it’s the best comfort we could have, because all those people love me very deeply, and (in the case of Our Lord) are actively watching over and providing for me, or (in the case of Our Lady and the Saints and Angels) guarding me and praying very hard for me.

So yeah, life may be rough and I may be lonely, but Jesus Christ has my back and St. Joan of Arc is praying for me, so I’ll get through okay, one of these days. Point is, the root of your sexual sins may not actually be chastity, and no matter how much chastity you build up in yourself, you will never actually deal with the sexual sins until you deal with the real root cause.

So, if you think you’re ready to hear that kind of thing, you can ask Our Lady of Sorrows for help. Be ready though, because she will not be mincing words with you if she answers. You asked, you wanted to know, and you get what you pray for. So just be psychologically ready to deal with that. My personal encounter here was probably over 2 years ago, and I’m still struggling with it on both sides of the fight. The brush fires still happen (though they’re getting easier to put out), and the base raids are still going on. Learning how to deal with your actual problems is tough.

But if you are dealing with chastity issues, I hope this post has given you some concrete tools you can use to start working on that. There’s plenty of people saying things like, “This stuff is evil, you have to put it down, you have to stop, it’s harming you and others,” and that’s all fine and grand and true. But not enough people, in my opinion, are telling people, “Okay, you wanna deal with this? Here’s step 1. Then step 2. Etc.”

This is, of course, for those of us without proper, regular spiritual directors, or an accountability network, or what have you. In the event you have that, thank God and you should defer to them. They probably have more practical experience than I do. But for those of us out here doing the lay monk life on our own, it’s easy to feel tossed around like a ship in a storm, and I figured some practical advice would be a help to someone.

Of course, the worst vice is ad-vice, so take what I say with a grain of salt and consider it prudently before doing anything herein described. Although the baseball cap thing should be pretty safe.

All that said, go forth and do the work of the Lord, brothers. It is our duty as Christians. And, as I like to say, “God has rights. Men have duties.” So get on doing yours, and I’ll get on with doing mine. Hope this helps. God bless and keep you.