Pornography is clearly a perversion. It is the publicizing of the private, the trading on what is a personal, private union between man and woman and no matter how 'tastefully' it is done it is wrong. Sadly it is all too common. Recently McGill University researchers tried to set up a study to estimate the impact of the consumption of pornography. They couldn't find enough men who had not been exposed to porn to establish a valid control group.
And to my shame, I am certainly no exception to the current urban legend that "all men watch porn".
Yet while I consider Porn perversion and repent of it, there is a much greater perversion, a much crueler act than any depicted on the seamier side streets of the internet.
Jesus was stripped, flogged, spat upon and mocked - the Creator was humiliated in every way that he could be by his creations. Yet none of this caused even a tiny fraction of the agony that he experienced when his beloved, his Abba, Father abandoned him. "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" is the most heart-rending, piercing phrase in the English language.
And Jesus' anguish at the Father's indifference toward him points the way to the greatest perversion of all: indifference by one's beloved. To feel the cold, grey dead gaze of those who promised to love and abide with you. To hear the resentful sigh, to feel the tensing and withdrawal from embrace. To feel like a commodity, a used up vessel is the greatest horror a spouse can experience. And the greatest perversion one can commit.
I believe our churches are stacked to the rafters with this type of 'holy pervert'. Thousands of Christian marriages founder every day on these rocks. And the sad thing is, that unlike the consumer of pornography who is denounced without ceasing from the pulpit, often they don't even realize their sin.
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