Final

“The wages of lust is death!”

In high school some of us would work half a day in the aircraft industry, then go to school the rest of the day. I remember bucking rivets on bombers, where the back-alley talk did more to feed my lust than pictures ever did. Part of me wanted what was on the wild side and wouldn’t be satisfied without it, religious upbringing notwithstanding.

I’m a walking history of the rise of the men’s magazines. In a way, my lust helped bring them into being. And, of course, they aided and abetted my lust. Lust always wanted more.

Expecting a child, we returned to California, where my wife could be closer to home. I wanted to finish college, so after the baby came, we lived in the veterans’ housing project on university campus. It was then I started taking off my wedding band so girls wouldn’t see I was married.

By twenty-six I had scored my first adulterous affair. And lightning didn’t strike me dead! What a wonderful freedom! I could enjoy adultery; I reveled in it. Free at last! Affairs followed, one after another… But adultery, even without guilt, didn’t solve my problem either. I didn’t know that lust itself was my problem, and that everything I was thinking and doing in the sexual area was only making it worse.

Then one night, out of nowhere, a prostitute jumped into my car. Was I ready! This was what I’d really been waiting for… This new ecstasy would surely lead me out of bondage into reality. No more complicated affairs or pseudo-romantic preludes. No strings. What a glorious freedom! Little did I know that again, I was hooked from the very first, never again free not to resort to prostitutes…

At this time I was in seminary studying theology and working as an assistant in a local church. Everything seemed to pile up on me all at once. For one thing, I couldn’t stand living the lie anymore, preaching and teaching the “Answer,” yet secretly living in total bondage. And the addiction had destroyed my marriage. Lust always came first… So after twelve years of tumultuous marriage and three beautiful children, I ran.

I had lost control of me. The compulsion had complete control, as it always had, from the very first. Only this was no longer “innocent.” Lust was taking on a malevolent aspect… Lust was [my] one and only wife, mistress, goddess, and slave master, and [I] was chained for life. My wives had never stood a chance.

I see now that in all my religious striving and psychotherapy I was waiting for the miracle to happen first, that I should somehow be zapped or “fixed,” unable ever to fall or be tempted again. I thought that if a person just had the right religious belief, he was automatically “a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” That all thought of lust would be removed, much as a tumor would be excised by a surgeon. The “religious solution” was one of the subtlest strategies in my arsenal of denial. I didn’t realize that the essence of being human is to have free choice. God doesn’t want to remove from me the possibility of falling; he wants me to have the freedom to choose not to fall. I’d been praying self-righteously all along, “Please God, take it away!” not realizing my inner heart was piteously whining, “…so I won’t have to give it up.” There was belief in God without surrender. That belief availed nothing!

It wasn’t long after this, in 1974, that I went to the mailbox and found the April 22^nd issue of Time magazine. Its cover story was on The New Alcoholism. I sat down, devoured the article, got up, and called Alcoholics Anonymous. Many things in the article had struck with the force of revelation: There were many “alcoholisms”; it was being called a disease; it was hitting men and women, old and young alike; the descriptions of powerlessness matched my own; treatment, described by some professionals, was like trying to “exorcise a host of demons.” Medicine, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis didn’t work. Alcoholics Anonymous did. I went to my first meeting that night.

The pain of awareness of who I really was drove me to work the Twelve Steps of recovery. The real freedom began when I could be free of my past. I became as a child, teachable, having to reject my way of doing and thinking for a new way of life based on surrender of my will to God…Believe me, none of this came easy! I just discovered that I had to do it to survive! I had to die to myself in order to live.

I’m still a sexaholic; my programming still makes me want to turn my head at anything that looks interesting and take a “drink.” Part of me still thinks I will die if I don’t. But one day at a time, one encounter at a time, one glance at a time, one thought or memory at a time, I don’t have to act on those impulses. I don’t have to drink it in.

It has been a totally new beginning for us. I’m just starting to get acquainted with my wife of seventeen years. I discover to my delight she’s a person: unique, independent, an individual, a whole universe of personality I was blind to before. And the more I die to any thought of resorting to someone else and commit myself to this one union, the more pleasure and love and freedom I find… The running is over. I’ve found what I was really looking for.