The heart has become a battlefield between love and lust. The more lust dominates the heart, the less the heart experiences the nuptial meaning of the body. It becomes less sensitive to the gift of the person, which expresses that meaning in the mutual relations of man and woman. Certainly, that lust which Christ speaks of in Matthew 5:27-28 appears in many forms in the human heart. It is not always plain and obvious. Sometimes it is concealed, so that it passes itself off as love, although it changes its true profile and dims the limpidity of the gift in the mutual relationship of persons. Does this mean that it is our duty to distrust the human heart? No! It only means that we must keep it under control.

Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body (General Audience, July 23, 1980)

Still, I had the ice from a large iced tea I had purchased half a mile up the hot highway; and I had other snacks I bought to make it worth a card swipe, having no cash.  All understandable.  And, because I hate to use someone’s space and not at least genuflect in the direction of their commercial interests, I walked inside, telling myself I would pick up a bottled tea to pour in the ice.

So why did I walk out with two bags of snacks, too?  Bags I didn’t want, really?  Bags which neither spared me needing dinner, later, nor helped to contribute to any goal, nor satisfied any strange-place curiosity, nor were a rarely-found favorite, nor provided me any reasonable good?

Because I saw them and I craved.

Why did I crave?  Partly because of habit.  This convenience store is one of three points along my longish commute that I could stop and pick something up all last year, and today I hit two of them (and, due to the fact that I forgot to address that bit of trim at the second one, I actually had to pull off again at the third, though without any additional snack shopping).

One should not underestimate the power of habit.  But I wasn’t so tired that I didn’t think about what I was doing.  No, I craved, and I bought, and I ate, even though I knew all three were a bad idea.

A Buddhist would probably describe this craving as a cause and symptom of being:  tanha, or Craving, the ninth link in the twelvefold chain of dependent co-origination.  It is related especially to sensation as the particular way “I” encounter “stuff not me,” and to clinging as the way “I” am sustained by and among “stuff not me.”  Of course, the Buddhist would view that coming to be “I” apart from “stuff not me” as both cause and symptom of avidya, the delusion that there can be any “I” apart from “stuff not me.”

The Buddhist view of craving is both fascinating and hopeless, as far as I can see.  Fascinating, because it means Buddhism really does grasp the psychology of what Christians call “lust” quite well.  Buddhist metaphysics assume against a Creator who intended the good of consequential interpersonal relationships, and Christianity makes no sense at all unless it begins by acknowledging such a Creator, so there is quite a lot of important difference all around this point–but on this point, the Buddhist account of dependent co-origination seems spot-on.  In fact, it seems to describe exactly what happens when–and to the extent–we lose track of the Creator-creature relationship in which we subsist.  (It is because Buddhism cannot credibly expect help from the Creator without ceasing to be Buddhism that it strikes me as hopeless, I say sadly but honestly.)

The Christian view, though, is surprisingly similar when it describes the psychology of lust.  As St. James tells us in his letter, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.  Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”  There is a fall into duality, just as in Buddhism; in the case of the Christian view, that duality is the duality of “each person” and “his own desire.”  There is a dependent co-origination of the fallen self by “his own desire,” that is, by the neglect of the Creator-creature relationship which permits the delusion St. Paul describes in the first chapter of Romans to take hold.  This delusion–that we, without regard for our Creator, can evaluate our relationship to other people, or even to our own desires, our own bodies, sanely–is the foremost consequence of what Christians call “original sin.”   “Original sin,” as opposed to what is usually called “Actual Sin” or “Personal Sin,” is that aspect of the reality of sin which is not a particular choice that we could make a rule against, but the fundamental obstacle to our choices being wholly good or our relationships wholly charitable.

I bought the snacks because I craved.  I lusted.

How do I know?  Well, I know because I really need to lose weight (natural law).  And I know because I had to defend a habitual behavior, a satisfaction not of honest desire, but of habitual behavior that manufactured “wanting” for justification.

This manufactured “wanting” of lust couldn’t be more different from the “innocent” desire I felt when I first ate birthday cake as a kid, or when that girl in junior high smiled at me.  That kind of desire depends on the introduction or gift of another:  we discover the goodness because it is offered.  That kind of desire is often impossible to fulfill, or even to understand, when it is first felt.  It does not justify anything, by itself.  We are made modest by it, because the contrast between what evokes and fulfills that desire and our efforts to ensure the fulfillments of our lust could not be more shamefully different.

I know–even my first desires were to some extent affected by the havoc original sin has wrought in my life, and in all our relationships with God and other people.  But I can see the layering, the manufactured “wanting” that gets farther and farther from birthday cake and a twinkle, grin, flip of the hair.

See, when I criticize the idea of stopping in the convenience store because I know I already bought stuff to ease the heat and tedium of the drive; when I tell myself I won’t get anything else, just the tea, because I really need to lose some weight; when I have to stand looking at the shelf, item after item, to find one that can arouse enough “wanting”; when I find myself opening up the bag while telling myself it was stupid to buy snacks, and notice that I still haven’t fixed that trim….

Then I know it’s lust.  And half an hour later, when I pull off the road to fix that bit of trim, I do the only sensible thing:  I fix it on the shoulder, and get on down the road.

And as I continue to seek to let Christ transform me, to be united to His suffering and Resurrection, it is my firm and realistic hope that I will be less likely to obscure the Creator-creature relationship, less likely to succumb to the delusion that I can evaluate my desires and relationships sanely apart from God, and therefore less likely to continue “birthing” a self fallen into duality, into double-mindedness and instability.