Staying awake

The Army of Heaven Prayer Group celebrates eight years of service to the recovery community and we give all thanks to the Holy Spirit for creating it and sustaining it. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. Amen!Sacraments, prayers, fasts, and meetings bring the Kingdom, through Jesus. The years have brought knowledge about dealing with thorns in the flesh, unique wisdom graces to struggling addicts, compulsives, sinners, sufferers of involuntary vice. We need this community, and perhaps there has not been such clear need in history until now. Consider our Church today; sexual afflictions and disconformities have never been so acute as now. But ever and again, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more!

Though the passage about the wandering spirit of arid regions [Matthew 25: 43-45] teaches the human necessity for true repentance, it speaks graphically to the unchaste and impure. The unclean spirit goes out to places that will not sustain it, so it returns to the addict or compulsive who sustained it in the past.

The vacant house is an image of an ‘unawake’ or indifferent soul, the creature who has neither yet the strong no against the spirits of lust nor the strong yes for God’s grace in the spirit of chastity. But human beings are made for bond, for relationship, and so if it is not with God, it will be with something else, such as, lust.

Our meeting is guided by 20 ways in Christ. To take them all up, is to fill our house with the Trinity, so that it is occupied, incapable of boarding demonic guests. Each way does important work and leads us to be filled with the multiplex powers of the Kingdom of God, which all flow from Christ and are Christ himself.

To recover from sexual obsession, addiction and compulsion is to agree to the final submission of carnal being to the spirit. Despite numerous falls, it is to agree that to live without sex is not impossible, and that redeemed chastity is supernatural, a supreme grace. Our great patron and intercessor St. Mary of Magdala experienced radical deliverance. She goes before the whole Church in the hope of true freedom, living in Christ. The strength of God alone allows it to be possible. Desire for holiness, desire for the victory of conversion, is our small human part. No recovery or redeemed sexual health can happen without it. If we lack the desire, we will never recover. We must ask for that desire if we do not have it, even constantly.

The enemy again is: lust, sensuality, selfishness, paganism, intoxication, the pride of self-power, blindness, stupidity, indifference, oblivion, dissipation, disintegration, the spirit of Eve’s take, the Devil.

If our soul is a house, Jesus teaches us it must be occupied. Filled by wisdom and good, with God Himself, otherwise it will be possessed and repossessed by stupidity and Evil.

The waking one encounters becomes a trinity: chooser, choice, grace. The untreated sick cannot yet see himself, nor his essential choice, nor the divine strength that could deliver him.

And so this daily morning prayer is given to all who lack right desire to be healed:

I abandon to God this day, every moment of this day any weakness to indulge intoxication allowing my Father to freely act to provide safe haven from the world, from my flesh, from the wiles of Satan, from the spirits of arousal, from anything that could contaminate or corrupt my desires

I pray for the grace of a strong will for the virtues of purity and chastity, for the grace of obedience to virtue. I beg to be filled with a deep hatred of vice and sin and that purity of heart which will attach me to God alone.

I pray for the extinction of lust from earth, for the extinction of addiction and compulsion from earth, I pray for the new Heaven and for the new Earth. In the name of Jesus I pray to You Father with gratitude and faith. Amen.