Today is end of the 5th week of Lent, and in the tradition of the Orthodox Church, we venerates Saint Mary of Egypt to mark off the occasion. To those unfamiliar and interested, Saint Mary of Egypt's personal story is one of the overcoming sexual passions. You can google her story on internet, there will be no short amount of material available.
In memory of the Venerable Mary, I thought that I too will write a personal reflection of my own struggles with sexual sins for the purpose of humbling myself and for the edification of whoever happens to read this. God knows that more men should speak up on such matter and may He strengthen me to write as honest and clear an account I can.
My story...
Something bad happened to me when I turned 13, I stumbled unto pornography. It happened the year I started going to high school, my best friend at the time invited me and a bunch of other friends over to watch a 'tape' that he had come into possession. We locked ourselves in his uncle's house, which was empty at the time, and together we watched a man and a woman have sex on screen and sinning against God and themselves. For many of us, it was the first time we watched something like that, I recalled feeling sick in my stomach and couldn't eat properly that night... Afterwards, in usual youthful bravado, we made a joke out of 'watching' event, but really what happened that day was bad, we wounded our souls, and our bodies and heart could feel it even if our minds were not aware of what has happened.
This momentous event, it marked the beginning of my downfall and devolution from a human being into an animal. Very soon, pornography took possession of my soul and I started down a rabbit hole of pornographic indulgence. As a child of the 1980s, I turned into an adolescent around the middle 90s, the time when the internet started to become main-stream. This is not a good time to be a teenager who has the time and urge to consume pornographic materials. By the time I was 17, 4 short years after being introduced to pornography, I was totally enslaved to my sexual passions, yet at the time I didn't even realize this was the case. After all everyone was watching porn, after all it's just watching people having fun. Along with watching porn, I also developed a whole raft of sexual urges and fetishes, some of which, in their demand to be satiated, cause me to act lewdly around girls. I suspect that I would have continued to spiral and who knows, maybe even become a sex criminal if not for another momentous event which happened to me the year I turned 18, right after completing my final high school exam (SPM). In this time, when we should be enjoying the bloom of our youth and nursing good hope for future, my conscience instead awoke to the horror of what I become and started persecuting and crucifying me.
It happened like this...
One day, me and my high school friends went to a coffee shop for breakfast. I was sitting opposite a girl, and she said in an off handed and joking way 'Why is your smile so yam jin (perverted)'. Somehow this innocent and off-handed comment turned out to be the last straw that allowed me conscience to broke through to me. For some reason I felt extremely disturbed by this comment, and the moment I went back home after breakfast, I went up to the mirror and flashed the most perverted smile I can to the mirror. Indeed, what stared back was not human, it was evil, it was animalistic, my soul quavered in horror, I have turned into an evil animal and I didn't know what to do about it.
Quickly, I tried to forget this bad incident, but to no avail, my conscience had awoke and it would not go back to sleep until I have atoned for my sins. Slowly, under the weight of the persecution of my conscience, I slowly withered psychologically, socially then physically. Back then, up till age 17, I was a warm person, someone who was basically the class clown that could bring laughter and amusement to everyone I met. I remembered distinctly how at a late night tea session, I could put a slightly shy girl at ease with my presence, I felt at the time a warm glow in my heart, that I was a human soul knitted together with other human souls.
The revelation however of my sins and of my fallen self, it changed all that and rewired my personality in a fundamental way... By the time I was 20+, abroad in UK pursuing a degree, I became hyper self conscious, I couldn't smile naturally as I felt it reveals to others the evil animal that I was. When I did have to smile, fear would shoot through my nervous system, and I would imagine that I was flashing up a half frozen grin. This cause me great anguish, and as my social relations started to fray and dwindle, my pornography consumption continued unabated. In fact, it became a solace for my loneliness in life. In my 20s, I contemplate running away to Brazil, living a frenzied life and then committing suicide there, such was the despair within me. Of course, things were not all bad, when I do return to my home country, sometimes things would lighten up for me more. My high school friends, they were a great solace to me during the time, and we hanged out and did silly stuff together. In fact one did even came to stay with me in UK for a couple of years (as he came to study at the same University), who knows if I would have committed suicide if not for him.
So thus, I passed most of my 20s in some sort an anguish intermix with momentary respite either from friends or alcohol. This continued on until my late 20s when something momentous happened to me again... I met my wife, the human savior of my life whom God put into my life. Here I begin the slow process of re-learning and re-believing that I am a human being worthy of love and worthy to give love. We started a relationship, forged it through my PhD years away from my home country and eventually got married and had a son. My sexual bad habits stayed with me, and I was not entirely free of my sins before or while in my marriage, but as with age also comes more temperance and it became much less. Nevertheless, I still couldn't smile properly, I fear that it reveals my true nature.
One thing to note. The night I got married, an instinct came over me, I needed to leave my past behind, completely. I need to be a new person. I didn't know how to do it at the time, and I thought the way to do this, was to leave all I know behind. I made a commitment, to no longer have any association with any of the things in the past that would remind me of my shameful history. I started cutting ties with my high school friends and felt like this was the only way I could move forward. Now I know this was not the solution.
The solution, it started to come... the years I turned 35-36.
In these years, I started to encounter Christ in my life, in a way which touches the heart. Up till then, I was a scientific atheist, and considered God to be a human delusion, and that my salvation depends entirely on me to stop the thoughts that I am an evil animal, either through some self-help methods or through some of the Buddhist psycho-therapy. This started to change when I encountered the lectures of Jordan Peterson online. His earnest lectures on the Bible managed to reach into a deep part of my soul, and were able to convinced me that God is perhaps not unreal. Soon, this trickle of an awareness grew, and I started to search for answers to the problem of why I was an evil animal through the Christian route. At age 36, I had another powerful encounter with the Christian Triune God through the writings of Dostoyevsky, in particular his work "The Brother Karamazov". This work, it showed me a vision of the greatness and loftiness of Christian goodness through the character of Aloysha Karamazov, I wept when I finally completed the book. It made me subconsciously resolve to find my answers through Christ and I started attending the Methodist churches under the semi-true semi-false pre-text of having to find a safe harbor for my son.
Then another momentous event hit my life and the lives of others in general. Covid-19 happened, and we were all grounded in our houses. This disrupted my church going activity, and by the time the lockdowns were lifted, my son had refuse to go to Church, and I stopped with him, believing that I am in a semi-OK state of not sinning as much, so maybe don't need God anymore. Nevertheless, I still couldn't smile properly, but I had at this point made progress here, having already confessed this problem to my wife. In my worldly life, I continue to struggled at career, in loving and raising my son, in making sure my broader family were OK. Things were OK, passable, not like in my college years were I felt like dying, my wife's love was for me, it was a great unspeakable solace, she is God's true gift for me. But as much as I was granted this undeserving gifts, something persisted in me along with my broken smile. At the background, I am always doubting things, what is the point of life ? Is this a cruel joke ? Why am I given at this animal body and then told not to use it like an animal. Why I am semi anguished. Why don't I have any real friends beyond my wife?
All this question persisted in me until I turned 40, when another momentous thing occurred in my life. God brought me back to Church, but this time not the Methodist Church, but the Church which spoke deeply to me, the Church whose one of her sons, the writer Dostoevsky revealed to me the possibility of human dignity, the Orthodox Church. God brought me back by putting online reading materials and Christian friends in my life to prompt me about my understanding and commitment to the faith. Under this guidance, I found myself back at Church, attending the regular Sunday services. Slowly the Orthodox Church began to reform me as a person, first as a catechist then as a baptized convert. I stopped watching porn entirely when I started going Church service regularly as a catechist, but things really started to really come into place after my baptism, where I was now able to participate in the Sacred Communions offered by the Church. Through this, God's grace started to flow into me more rapidly, and revealed to me how I can through prayers and communion rid myself of other sins which has gathered around my mind/heart/soul. Soon, I could see others patterns of thought and behavior within me that were evil and animalistic, and I had the power of Communion and prayer to be rid of them and persecute them, to bring them under dominion instead of being dominated by them. I was am now healing, I am recovering my humanity...
During this Great Lent season, I feel the pace of healing has picked up more rapidly, and my soul has more moments where it is at peace. My heart radiates a low indistinct warmth that somehow feels like the presence of the Holy Spirit. My mind, while it still veers and jumps, and is still used relentlessly by the Spirts of the Passion to entice me to sin, I am now much more able to fight this battle, to control and discipline it and persecute the bad thoughts through prayers. My relationships, they are mending, I can feel love for others more. I believe in Love, a word only approximately used to describing and trying to capture something ineffable and infinite. I can appreciate the manifestation of Love, when people show glimpses of it to each others, these make me wants to fall down and weep sometimes (but it also makes me want to show-off in search of vainglorious praises)...
I don't know where this Christian life will take me further, but I would not trade what I have now for anything in the world I suppose. Not the 27 years of living like an animal, not the suicidal periods of my life. Anyway, I need to bring this to an end as it is 8:50 and I will need to go met the Triune God at Church... May this writing be of edification to those who read it.. And to my high school friends, I would like to apologies to you all. Mostly, I wrote this for you all.
